“Popular Criticism”
Course description
“Popular Criticism” will explore criticism of the popular arts written for a mass audience. Basic concepts of art criticism will be refigured to include entertainment criticism with central issues such as context, balance, manipulation, novelty, sentiment and audience considered. Students will form their own approach to popular criticism and apply it to four mass art forms -- the fiction novel, television, film, and music. The idea is not to tell students what is good or bad in popular art but to give them the tools to decide such for themselves and then communicate their thoughts to a broad readership. Beyond that, the hope is to teach students to see and comment critically on social concerns reflected in the popular arts.
Course goals
1) To stimulate consideration of the purpose of entertainment and art
2) To build a system of evaluation that allows for effective and consistent judgment of the popular arts
3) To learn how to clearly express opinions succinctly in both a longer (750 word) and shorter (250 word) format
4) To learn to write in a manner that is both engaging to a mass audience and intellectually sound
5) To extrapolate larger social trends and concerns reflected in popular culture and write about them in a manner that’s economical, readable, and, to the extent possible, comprehensive
Assignments/process
Over the length of the course students will be expected to write three 750-word pieces. Students will also be writing 10 250-word pieces for the course, most of which will be small reviews, but a few of which will be on general topics covered in the class.
Works covered and discussed in class will include three films, two fiction novels, one hour-long television drama, two episodes of a television sitcom, one full-length music album, one pop song, a live concert performance and one entire season of a long-form television drama.
All works reviewed will be chosen by the instructor. The fiction and television season will be assigned the first day of class; all other works will be revealed on the day they are to be reviewed.
The 750-word pieces will be written on a) any one review topic of the student’s choice, b) the TV season assigned and c) a larger social trend story as a final paper, considering what a pop culture phenomenon (vampires, apocalyptic stories, politicians as unerringly corrupt) says about our world.
Students will also be asked to read alternating Friday editions of USA Today and the New York Times for the first 10 weeks of the course, and asked to bring in examples of what they consider both good and bad popular criticism.
During each class anonymous samples from the previous week’s student critiques will be read in class and discussed.
The text for the class will be “The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture” by Henry Jenkins.
Grading
Forty percent of the final grade will be based on the student’s reviews and papers, with the weight of those reviews growing progressively; 20 percent will be based on the social trend story final; and 40 percent will be based on classroom participation.
Editing and writing assistance
Many if not most students will not have written popular criticism before, so the instructor will be available before classes and through appointment for coaching and editing assistance.
Materials needed
Text (affordable on Amazon); TV season (about $30 or Netflix); two fiction books (common usage, Amazon or used book store); one concert ticket (low cost)
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