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The Rise of Pop

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The Rise of Pop Expos 20: The Rise of Pop Fall 2014 Barker 133, MW 10:00 & 11:00 Kevin Birmingham (birmingh@fas) Expos Office: 1 Bow Street #223 Office Hours: Mondays 12:15-2 The idea that there is a hierarchy of art forms – that some styles, genres and media are superior to others – extends at least as far back as Aristotle. Aesthetic categories have always been difficult to maintain, but they have been particularly fluid during the past fifty years in the United States. What does it mean to undercut the prestige of high art with popular culture? What happens to art and society when the boundaries separating high and low art are gone – when Proust and Porky Pig rub shoulders and the museum resembles the supermarket? This course examines fiction, painting and film during a roughly ten-year period (1964-1975) in which reigning cultural hierarchies disintegrated and older terms like “high culture” and “mass culture” began to lose their meaning. In the first unit, we will approach the death of the high art novel in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, which disrupts notions of literature through a superficial suburban American landscape and through the form of the novel itself. The second unit turns to Andy Warhol and Pop Art, which critics consider either an American avant-garde movement undermining high art or an unabashed celebration of vacuous consumer culture. In the third unit, we will turn our attention to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the rise of cult films in the 1970s. Throughout the semester, we will engage art criticism, philosophy and sociology to help us make sense of important concepts that bear upon the status of art in modern society: tradition, craftsmanship, community, allusion, protest, authority and aura. Readings (Available at the Harvard Coop): Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49. Harper Perennial. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackettt, POPism: The Warhol Sixties. Harcourt, Inc. Shorter Readings will be handed out in class throughout the semester. Copies of The Rocky Horror Picture Show are on reserve at Lamont. We will also have a screening of Rocky Horror (attendance required), time and location TBA. Papers Over the course of the semester you will draft and revise three essays. Each unit will focus on developing a particular writing skill. In the first unit, you will learn the mechanics of close reading and how to use evidence in a paper. In the second unit, you will enter into a critical debate and learn how to use secondary sources in order to craft a sharp thesis statement. In the third unit, you will focus on applying theories to texts while building on the skills of the previous two units. Participation Attendance and participation are crucial. Please finish all reading and assignments on time so that you are prepared for class and ready to contribute to our scintillating discussion of schlock. We will begin roughly 8 minutes after the hour (welcome to Harvard!), so please be on time. If you cannot make it to class, please send me an email. Two unexcused absences will be detrimental to your participation grade, and Expos policy requires that we notify your dean. NOTE: This is a class about Pop, but the readings for this course are not easy. If you are uncomfortable with challenging readings, you should sign up for other courses. An unannounced reading quiz may be given at my discretion. Conferences I will meet with each of you individually for 20 minutes after you submit each essay draft. We will discuss the status of your work and what revisions will improve your paper before the final version is due. Conferences will take place over three days, and your revised essay will be due six days after your conference. Please arrive for your conference on time. Another student is following your time slot immediately, so lateness will only result in less sage advice from Your Faithful Preceptor. Workshops Some of the work you produce for this course will be read by the rest of the members in the seminar. Don’t panic! We’re all in the same boat, and the purpose of these workshops is for you to have constructive advice from your peers and for you to see how other students write and solve composition problems. Grading Only the final version of each essay will be graded. But timely submission of drafts and reading responses will be a part of your class participation grade. Grade Distribution: Essay 1: (4-5 pages): 20% Essay 2: (6-7 pages): 25% Essay 3: (8-9 pages): 35% Class Participation: 20% Pop Policies No laptops Forget google. Forget the Interwebs. Bring Notebooks. Submitting Work Submit all work (reading responses, essay drafts and essay revisions) on our course website dropbox. You will find the website on the “courses” tab when you log onto my.harvard.edu. • Late work: Late submissions will received a deduction of one grade of each day. Note: a failed upload or email transmission is not an acceptable excuse. • Extensions: One extension during the semester on either an assignment, draft or revision is possible, though not guaranteed. Late work will also be accepted with a letter from the Freshman Dean’s Office or UHS. • Paper formatting: Use a standard 12-point font (Times New Roman, Garamond, Book Antiqua), double-spaced, one-inch margins. Number pages and paragraphs. Get Enough Sleep Seriously. Important Due Dates Essay 1 Draft: Sept. 26 Essay 1 Revision: Oct. 5-7 (six days after your conference) Essay 2 Draft: Oct. 24 Essay 2 Revision: Nov. 2-4 Essay 3 Draft: Nov. 21 Essay 3 Revision: Dec. 9 Harvard College Writing Program Policy on Attendance Because Expos has a shorter semester and fewer class hours than other courses, and because instruction in Expos proceeds by sequential writing activities, your consistent attendance is essential. If you are absent without medical excuse more than twice, you are eligible to be officially excluded from the course and given a failing grade. On the occasion of your second unexcused absence, you will receive a letter warning you of your situation. This letter will also be sent to your Resident Dean, so the College can give you whatever supervision and support you need to complete the course. Apart from religious holidays, only medical absences can be excused. In the case of a medical problem, you should contact your preceptor before the class to explain, but in any event within 24 hours: otherwise you will be required to provide a note from UHS or another medical official, or your Resident Dean. Absences because of special events such as athletic meets, debates, conferences, and concerts are not excusable absences. If such an event is very important to you, you may decide to take one of your two allowable unexcused absences; but again, you are expected to contact your preceptor beforehand if you will miss a class, or at least within 24 hours. If you wish to attend an event that will put you over the two-absence limit, you should contact your Resident Dean and you must directly petition the Expository Writing Senior Preceptor, who will grant such petitions only in extraordinary circumstances and only when your work in the class has been exemplary. Harvard College Writing Program Policy on Completion of Work Because your Expos course is a planned sequence of writing, you must write all of the assigned essays to pass the course, and you must write them within the schedule of the course—not in the last few days of the semester after you have fallen behind. You will receive a letter reminding you of these requirements, therefore, if you fail to submit at least a substantial draft of an essay by the final due date in that essay unit. The letter will also specify the new date by which you must submit the late work, and be copied to your Resident Dean. If you fail to submit at least a substantial draft of the essay by this new date, and you have not documented a medical problem, you are eligible to be officially excluded from the course and given a failing grade. You will submit at least some of your work electronically this semester. As you send or upload each document, it is your responsibility to ensure that you have saved the document as a Word file (or in a form compatible with Word). It is also your responsibility to ensure that the file you send is not corrupted or damaged. If I cannot open or read the file you have sent, the essay will be subject to a late penalty. Policy on Academic Integrity In this Expository Writing course, we’ll study many features of academic argument that will help you to understand how scholars use sources and distinguish their own ideas from those of other scholars. You’ll learn to accurately quote, paraphrase and cite source, to assess their validity and usefulness to your own thinking, to use some kinds of sources as evidence that you’ll analyze and argue about, and other kinds of sources as a theoretical foundation or counterargument to extend or deepen your own ideas about a subject. You will learn why it is crucial to the academic enterprise that we all clearly distinguish our own work from that of our sources, and you will learn at least one of the citation methods by which scholars acknowledge their sources. Please also pay particular attention to the following statement from the Harvard College Policy on Academic Dishonesty (excerpted from the Student Handbook): “All homework assignments, projects, lab reports, papers and examinations submitted to a course are expected to be the student's own work.
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