Prof. Hatfield  here. I have decided that we will not have a mandatory final in 313. However, some of you may want to exercise the option of doing a final paper for extra credit. If you want to do that, you will need to complete the task below and submit your response to the forum on our class’s Moodle homepage no later than Monday, Dec. 13, at 5:00pm. I cannot accept email submissions due to the extraordinary amount of email traffic that comes at the end of the semester.

Dec. 13 is absolutely the last day I can accept any work related to 313, because I must complete all grading for the course very soon afterward.

Bear in mind that this extra credit option is not a guarantee of points. I can say, though, that excellent responses will generally receive 40 to 50 points, fair responses 20 to 30 points, and poor responses less. Very slipshod responses will receive no credit.

Your response should be in  the form of a roughly 750-word essay written in response to the following prompt:

So, let’s say you are sitting at Acapulco’s during Happy Hour, and all your classes have just ended. You are basking in your freedom. The place is crawling with people and the music coming from the bar is punishingly loud, but you’re fine, you’re mellow. After all, classes are done, and you’re enjoying some down time with a few good friends and fellow CSUN students. You’re having dinner, say, or having drinks if you like, and you’re all leaning into each other to make yourselves heard as you talk about what you’ve been taking class-wise this semester, and what you think of it all.

You start talking about your experience in your just-completed English 313 class. One of your friends (you can decide who, but make it a very smart friend) is especially curious about the course because s/he is thinking about taking it next year. You search for words to try to explain what the class is all about, but, before you can gather your thoughts (remember, Acapulco’s at Happy Hour is no quiet, peaceful little hideaway), your friend asks a pointed question about something posted on the 313 class blog a few weeks ago:

“Popular culture always is part of power relations.” — John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture

“Hmm. This sounds suspiciously political,” says your friend. “Tell me, what exactly is that class about, and what does ‘power’ have to do with it? If I take this course in the fall, am I going to be studying politics?”

You think about this question and you try to answer it honestly and completely, but it’s difficult. (Hey, the joint is jumping and it’s hard to focus.) One moment in the conversation leaps out at you, though, and stays in your mind even afterward, as you make your way home. It’s a follow-up question, or challenge, posed by your friend:

So, tell me about ‘power’ in popular culture. Honestly, did this 313 class empower you at all? I mean, if there’s supposed to be some sort of power struggle going on, what’s your place in it, and has taking the class given you any power?

You’re still mulling over this question late that night, when, to your surprise, you find yourself willingly returning to schoolwork — that is, sitting down at your desktop/laptop/notepad and trying to come up with a thorough, cogent response to your friend’s question. (Hey, I know this is unrealistic, but we instructors have to have our fantasies!) Now that you have your wits and your books and other resources about you, and are able to compose your thoughts in a serious manner, you decide to write a message to send to everyone in your group of friends and fellow students. Maybe you’ll even blog it, to share it with the rest of the world. “I’ll show those skeptics what it’s all about,” you say to yourself. At the top of your message you write/type the following prompt to yourself:

If popular culture is about power, then how, if at all, can English 313 affect the balance of power? What power, if any, has the course given me?

Then you start writing…

So, there you have it, a prompt. If you’re interested, respond to this prompt in an organized, well-defended, cleanly-presented essay, one that draws on John Fiske and on other sources and/or examples from our class readings and/or discussions. Be sure to talk about, and honor, your own experiences and outlook (obviously, you may use the first person here, since the prompt asks for personal reflection). Tell yourself that you are writing for an audience of smart, ambitious University students who are used to challenging work and genuinely curious about the study of popular culture. Go for it, and good luck!

To get some idea of what fan studies is about, and what is possible in the field, check out the recently-launched online academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, or TWC.

TWC is an international peer-reviewed journal published by the non-profit Organization for Transformative Works. It publishes articles about “transformative works,” meaning, broadly, cultural works transformed by the individual fans and fan collectives who use and discuss them. Fan fiction, or fanfic, for example.

You can find out more by skimming the Table of Contents of their first five issues, which cover a huge range of stuff. For example, the first issue covers everything from Star Trek to Warhammer 40,000 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential primary campaign to horror fiction to BDSM “slash” fiction to theories and practices of collective (not individual) authorship.

Not a bad site to bookmark.

True or False (answer from your own perspective): When you are “at work,” you owe your employer all of your energy and attention from the time you start work to the time you leave, and everything you do while at work should serve your employer’s interests.

Do you agree? Why or why not?

Michel de Certeau discusses the ways in which workers exercise creativity on “company time,” using the term la perruque (lit., the wig) to describe this kind of rogue creativity. He presents this as an alternative to a working life that is overly rationalized, precisely regimented, controlled by corporatization, inflexible, and sterile.

On the other hand, many in the business world describe this phenomenon as “time theft” and see it in negative terms. They view time theft as a threat to productivity. So what we have here is a battle to determine how minutely workers’ time can be controlled. Here are some references from various perspectives:

1. The Urban Dictionary definition of time theft.

2. Jon Jacobs, on “Deconstructing Time Theft,” at JobsintheMoney.

3. William Atkinson on time theft, from the journal Risk Management (2006).

4. Barbara Ehrenreich on working for WalMart (2002).

5. An article on an art installation inspired by De Certeau, titled La Perruque (from a San Franciso city guide in 2001).

Happy reading! Hopefully these sources will help bring to life De Certeau’s abstract concepts.

Kirk and Spock, by Daniel James Cox

Apropos of our reading of Henry Jenkins’ essay on GLBT Star Trek fandom (in The Audience Studies Reader), you may find interesting this 2001 article by Jonathan Kay from Salon.com discussing the relative (in)visibility of gayness in the official Trek universe.

Speaking of what fans can do to, or with, a text, and how texts can be put to unofficial or unexpected purposes, check out this article about superhero-themed fetish parties in New York’s GLBT community.

Or, perhaps closer to our Jenkins reading, dig this fan music video accompanying Stephen Lynch’s (warning: off-color) song “If I Were Gay”:

Richard Hoggart (1918-) is an enormously important figure in the history of cultural studies, having written the seminal book The Uses of Literacy (1957) and many other works and having founded, in 1964, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham.

The CCCS was the wellspring of cultural studies in Britain, and has had a strong influence internationally. It operated from 1964 to 2002, when it was closed (to great controversy).

A still from The Blackboard Jungle (dir. Richard Brooks, 1955), which we'll soon be discussing in class.

In 313 we’ll soon be discussing the concept of moral panic, a term used by cultural critics to describe episodes of widespread public anxiety over putatively “deviant” or “dangerous” behaviors or groups that are said to pose a threat to society.

Often young people and youth culture are the targets of moral panic, as discussed in both John Springhall’s Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics and James Gilbert’s A Cycle of Outrage (both of which are excerpted in our Moodle readings). We’ll be exploring this theme in upcoming classes.

The Wikipedia page on “moral panic” is unusually thorough and well-documented. Worth a look, and worth bookmarking.

Also, here is an example of something fascinating that developed fairly recently and might or might not be categorized as an instance of moral panic: the widespread reaction to an online “game” or pastime called Miss Bimbo, in which players compete to create the ultimate stereotypic “bimbo,” or idealized female figure (the link here will take you to a story in the London Times online). Yow, it’s a mind-boggler.

Finally, here’s an excerpt from the lyrics to that classic by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” (released on Gee Records in 1957):

I’m not a juvenile delinquent

No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no

No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no

No-no-no, I’m not a juvenile delinquent

Do the things that’s right

And you’ll do nothing wrong

Life will be so nice, you’ll be in paradise

I know, because I’m not a juvenile delinquent

But listen boys and girls

You need not be blue

And life is what you make of it

It all depends on you

I know, because I’m not a juvenile delinquent

It’s easy to be good, it’s hard to be bad

Stay out of trouble, and you’ll be glad

Take this tip from me, and you will see

How happy you will be…

(Lymon, incidentally, died of a heroin overdose at age 25.)

1. First off, the Marxists Internet Archive (MIA) supplies some useful contextual information about the so-called Frankfurt School and its best-known contributors.

2. Secondly, a very well-known and important scholar associated with the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, is referenced in our Adorno reading. The relevant work by Benjamin, a famed essay titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” can be found at MIA. Adorno and Benjamin are not interchangeable thinkers, but can be seen as usefully complementing if not contradicting one another.

3. Thirdly, also in connection with Benjamin, the 1972 BBC television series Ways of Seeing (which also led to a book of the same name) was greatly inspired by the work of Benjamin, particularly the aforementioned “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Hosted and largely written by John Berger, this TV series has been very influential. Here FYI, via YouTube, is an excerpt:

The chief questions in play for our Frankfurt School scholars were, is mass culture revolutionary in its potential? And, if so, why is it so often reactionary in its effects?

Essential stuff for students of popular culture! Please read this ASAP.

You may also be interested in the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University, where Horkheimer and Adorno began their classic work.