For When Reading Hurts

For When Reading Hurts

The best way to intimidate people from other disciplines who try to talk trash on communication is to show them the sort of essays we read. Reading scholarly writing is a distinct skill requiring both familiarity with the way scholars communicate and a solid grounding in the subject matter they are writing about. Remember that scholars usually write for other specialists, which means that they can make a lot of assumptions about their audience that they wouldn’t make if they were writing for, say, a popular magazine.Fortunately, even though academic writing can be intimidating you can and will learn to read it with relative ease and confidence (no promises on bad translations of French philosophers, you’re on your own there). For this assignment you will be placed in groups of two, and you will chose one of the articles below to read and summarize for the class. Each article can only be chosen by one group, so it’s first come first serve. Your summary should be in outline format and at most 2 double-space pages. Include the following:
1) What is the main argument, the thesis, of the article?
2) What sort of method is the author using, and what kind of evidence does he or she use?
3) What are the major sub-points the author uses to make that argument? Chose what you view to be the most critical piece of evidence for each point and include mention of that.
4) Finally, what is your article building on or responding to? Is it a particular article or book? A common argument? Put another way—WHY was this written?Finally, remember that it is harder to write or speak short than to write or speak long. Just because both the speech and the written summary are relatively short doesn’t mean it’s easier because of it, it’s actually that much harder. You MUST know your article forwards and backwards to succeed at this assignment.Choose one of the following:1) Lawrence Levine, “William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation”
2) Paul Dimaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America”
3) Gael Sweeny, “The Trashing of White Trash: Natural Born Killers and the Appropriation of the White Trash Aesthetic”
4) Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, “From Carnival to Transgression”
5) Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception”
6) Warren Susman, “The People’s Fair: Cultural Contradictions of a Consumer
Society”
7) Raymond Williams, “Culture” (excerpt) **Note this is NOT the same as “Culture is Ordinary”
8) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology”
9) Dick Hebdige, “From Culture to Hegemony”
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