The Gwaemul Analysis

Someone emailed me on Sunday to (correctly) point out that I haven’t yet posted my analysis of 괴물. The problem is that I haven’t got enough room on the server that hosts this site. I am currently looking into some other place where I can host the file, and as soon as I find one — hopefully later this week — I’ll post a link here.

Tuesday, we’ll be looking at the last 40-odd minutes of Bamboozled, and then talking about the history ofblackface minstrelsy a bit more, discussing racial stereotypes and character archetypes — and how much they overlap — and doing an (interesting!) exercise.

Remember, Thursday, there will be a Panel Discussion of James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village.”  (Linked further down on this page.) You will need to make some preparations for that panel, especially thinking about the essay and having some questions ready. They’ll count towards your panel discussion grade, and if you actually ask them, and they’re good, they’ll even count towards your all-important participation mark. So think up some good questions, folks!

(And yes, I’ll explain this more in class on Tuesday!)

Handouts and Today’s Exercise (March 31st)

Here are the handouts from March 31st:

Self-Evaluation Form — Week 5 (PDF) (To be filled out and handed in by April 2nd)

Project Evaluations — for The Declarations Project (PDF) (to be filled out and handed in by April 2nd)

For both of the above, please write “Listening & Speaking — Day” at the top of the page.

Also, here is the PDF of the priorities exercise from today’s class, for after the second try at our Declaration Project presentations. I hope everyone brings some scissors to class!

The Priorities Exercise (PDF)

Essays for April 2nd

Here are the essays for critique for April 2nd:

Essay #1 for April 2nd

Essay #2 for April 2nd

Make sure you’ve read both, make some markings and suggestions on the paper, and prepared your thoughts. As usual, you will have 90 seconds to speak. I’m not sure whether we’ll get to both essays on April 2nd, but we might, so be prepared to discuss both.

(And the numbers don’t mean anything — we might discuss Essay #2 first! It’s just the order in which I upload the essays, which is alphabetical order of the filenames!)

See you Monday!

Outlines and An Essay for You To Read

Next Monday, March 31st, we’ll be discussing essay structure, and the planning/outlining process. Your homework before then involves the following:

  1. Submit a draft of your thesis statement by closing time in my mailbox at the English Language & Culture Department Office, which is in room 205 , 다솔관.
  2. Download, print, and review this handout about Outline formatting, and also this one about how to use outlines as an essay-template. We will be discussing the planning process and outlines, as well as what they are and are not good for. Feel free to work on planning and tentatively outlining your midterm essay if you like, but bear in mind that I will have some unusual things to say about the planning and outlining process.
  3. Print a copy of this PDF — an essay titled A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart — and read it before Monday’s class. Although the essay is very clear and mostly straightforward, it’s also somewhat long — 25 pages — so make sure you start reading it before Monday afternoon!

Remember to check back on Sunday for the two essays that you will be critiquing on Wednesday, April 2nd!

UPDATE: Also, I was reminded that I forgot to collect your “rewrites” of the various theses from the exercise last week. I will be collecting those next week (Monday or Wednesday is fine), for checkmarks towards your final homework grade.  (Thanks for the reminder, Dae Young!)

The Discussion Worksheet (For March 27th)

Please have a look at page 2 of this document: it’s the worksheet I mentioned in class today. Make sure you print it off, read it, understand it, and are ready to discuss it in class on Thursday night.

The Christmas Declaration (complete PDF)

Classblog Installed!

The class blog for this class has finally been installed. See the sidebar (under “Student Writing Sites”) for the links to register, login, and view the blog.

Make sure you join the blog for the right class!

I haven’t styled the pages, though I may get around to that later this week. But try register and login and see what happens. And please talk to me after class (or email me) if you have any problems with the system!

You are expected to start using this blog in the coming week. Good luck!

Panel Discussions

A few people have asked me to expand a little on the subject of the Panel Discussions part of the course.

Each student will be required to participate in a Panel Discussion event. These will usually, but not always, be held on the Tuesday class meeting. The Panelists will be expected to prepare for a one-hour (actually, 50-minute) discussion of a given topic. The discussion should focus on the general topic, and on whatever assigned material I have chosen for the panel discussion, but of course can also stray to subjects related to it.

For example, if we were to discuss the Korean movie Memories of Murder, and you if you were on the panel for that discussion, you might consider preparing thoughts on the following:

Not only are the above reasonable topics for a Panel Discussion of Memories of Murder, but you can also prepare questions for your panel members, or ask them questions spontaneously. Remember, you should also be able to answer your own questions!

You should also be mentally prepared for the fact that the audience (all of your classmates) will come to class with questions prepared for you, and that I (Gord) will be acting as moderator, urging people to contibute, choosing students to ask questions, and maybe even asking a question or two of my own!

Now, all of that probably doesn’t give you a really good idea of what we’ll be doing, so I thought I’d like to a video online that will give you a clearer sense of things. Here is an example of a Panel Discussion at a conference in New Orleans, about whether the Harry Potter character Severus Snape is a good guy or a bad guy, and the nature of characters in Harry Potter in general. The language might be challenging at certain moments, but the interaction is pretty good — there’s agreements, disagreements, changes in topic, returns to earlier questions, and more. This is what a classic Panel Discussion is like — lively, interesting, and thoughtful, but fun too.

That should just about do it for explanations. Except for one thing: the grading part of the exercise. I will be grading you individually and I will be taking the following into account:

Part of your grade will also be determined by your participation in Panel Discussions led by others, in the form of prepared questions.  At the end of each panel discussion that they have attended as a non-participant, students can submit written questions and prep sheets for  a checkmark. (Which will only be given if the prep sheets show a reasonable amount of thoughtful preparation for the panel.)

That should just about do it for explanations. Every please remember that our first Panel Discussion will  take place on April 1st, and the topic (in general) will be James Baldwin’s essay “The Stranger in the Village” (which was linked in the last post I made on this site) and on the archetype of “The Other.”

A Reminder — For March 26th and Beyond

Next week, March 24th is a holiday (Easter Monday) so we will not be meeting for class. On March 26th, we will spend our classtime doing the following:

What we won’t be doing in class next week is discussing the progress on your essays. However, you should consider the fact that next week is Week 4. This means that we’re halfway to midterm exams. I’m probably going to want your essays at the beginning or end of Midterm Exam Week, meaning that you haven’t got much time left.

The most important things to be doing outside of class are:

In the coming weeks (ie. until midterm exams), we’ll be discussing the following:

As for the long-range  plan, I think you’ll be working on a single essay all semester — meaning that my feedback will be important, and that you will be rewriting the essay you’re working on now several times. This means research won’t stop for a long time. So keep considering what you should read or look at next! Keep using the Mind Map exercise to pick out interesting connections between the issues or topics surrounding your thesis, and keep thinking about your topic, freewriting about it, and taking notes whenever you get a good idea.

Homework & Preparations for March 25th/27th & April 1st

Here’s what’s up for the next couple of weeks:

On March 25th, I’ll be finishing up my lecture on Genre in 괴물 and then we’ll be watching the Spike Lee film Bamboozled (IMDB, Wikipedia, subtitle file in case anyone wants to “read the script” beforehand).

If you’re not familiar with Spike Lee, I envy you the pleasure of discovering him for the first time. He’s one of the best directors in America at the moment, at least in my opinion, and certainly has been the most famous African-American movie director for a long time. His films are both entertaining and often satirical, but also intelligent, critical, and politically charged. Bamboozled is about 132 minutes long, so we’ll be watching it for much of next week, though I hope to get in some comments about blackface minstrelsy — a form of popular entertainment in America and, in fact, around the Anglophone world — from the early/mid-19th century to the early/mid-20th.

As preparation, you should consider reading up on Blackface Minstrel preformance, such as on this Wikipedia page. Feel free to explore further on your own. A noted and fascinating bookn on the subject — one I’ll be using for reference in preparation of my lecture — is John Strausbaugh’s 2006 text Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture (Tarcher/Penguin: New York, 2006).

Also as preparation, I expect that you will watch the following movie, which is available free online: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (free online at Google video, or download it from the Internet Archive here for free. It’s so old that that’s legal!). I expect that you will watch this three-hour movie before our next class, or at least during the coming week.

By the way, The Birth of a Nation is the film I mentioned in my lecture on 괴물 in connection to King Kong. The Birth of a Nation is the most famous and politically charged example of a film depiction of African-Americans not only because of the use of blackface on white actors, but also because of the subject of the film — it’s a glorification of the forming of the racist, criminal organization known as the Ku Klux Klan after the American Civil War. You can read more about the film here, and feel free also to enjoy this short clip from DJ Spooky’e remix of the movie here.

(And yes, Birth of a Nation is very long, and a silent movie, and disgustingly racist too, but is effect on film history, and the way the racism manifested in the film, make it very important to the subject we’re watching. So yes, you really should watch it. Part II is especially important.)

Bubble Sisters

Here are some more videos, mp3s, and texts to check out when you have a free moment, which will present more images from the era when blackface was commonplace (in the West, anyway). I encourage you to explore them throughout this week:

Finally, on April 1st, we’ll have a classroom discussion of Bamboozled and various archetype of The Other, followed by a panel discussion on Baldwin’s The Stranger in the Village.

(On April 3rd, I’ll probably give you a crash course on the influence of African-American culture on American (and world) popular culture, spanning from the swing era and its jazz big bands all the way to hip-hop today, and including not only music but dance, language, fashion, and youth culture identity. I’ll have more online for you as that day approaches.)

Happy Easter Long Weekend!

PS: I’ll post a copy of the 괴물 Powerpoint once I’ve finished giving that lecture. So, sometime next week. You should be reviewing your notes and other class materials, because you never know when a surprise quiz might appear on your desk!

For March 25th/27th…

For March 25th, we will continue and conclude our discussion of Parts 1 and 2 of The Hacker Crackdown and I will make an attempt to sum up what we’ve figured out so far. I’ll also have a couple of discussion questions for the group. Depending on time, I will also introduce you to the classblog so that you can start on your media blog posting next week.

For March 27th, we will have a somewhat more light class. Since this is a media class, I’m declaring March 27th Youtube Day!

Therefore, you have until March 27th to choose your favorite Youtube video, which you will present to the class. Now, it’s not enough just to play the video. You need to explain why it is so brilliant, funny, important, or exciting that you have decided to spend classtime on it. That is, you will make a short presentation about the clip and explain to us why it’s interesting, why it’s related to the subject of media, or why it’s so brilliant.

One piece of advice — it’s better to show us something that isn’t posted from the mainstream media. If you show us a funny clip from the Simpsons, just because it’s funny, that’s less impressive than showing us something like this clip, because there’s a lot more to talk about:

If I were going to present the video above, I would discuss how:

… and so on.

However, don’t feel as if you need to necessarily post a serious clip. One clip I considered presenting, but decided not to, is this one:

If I were presenting about this video, I’d present it this way:

So it’s up to you to do what you want. The only rule is, find something interesting to talk about. Oh, and by the way, nobody use my favorite video, which is a video by the Swedish techno group Familjen. We’ll talk about that in class.

And after the Youtube discussion, I’ll clear up any problems people are having with the Media English classblog, if there are any problems at all.

Don’t forget, we will resume discussions of Parts 3 and 4 of The Hacker Crackdown, on April 1st and hopefully conclude on April 3rd! So keep on reading the book and taking notes.

I’ll assign some discussion groups next Thursday afternoon (March 27th) to lead our discussions on April 1st and 3rd.

Have a nice long weekend!

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