Week Seven: Existentialism, Love and the Roots of the Hipster Musical

Catherine Deneuve amidst the umbrellas

Watching Assignment: Please watch Pitch Perfect (2012). 

In Class: We will be watching The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) directed by Jacques Demy. After the film we will be discussing musicals, their position in pop culture and their current resurgence in movies like Pitch Perfect and Frozen.

Writing Assignment: Due this week is your discussion of the contemporary hipster. This can be a discussion of the hipster as a sub-culture, hipness as an aesthetic, or even just a discussion of something you think we should be hip to.  The discussion should include your categorization (define whatever you are discussing) a collection (examples of the phenomena you are discussing) and an appreciation (what is cool or interesting about the specific examples you have chosen).

The point of this writing is to advance your skills as a content mediator and commentator on contemporary culture. The best way to approach your discussion of this topic is to start with something you find interesting and important to your own life and work, some element of contemporary culture that sustains you and that we might not consider or know that much about. You are directing our attention to it.

Next Week's Writing Assignment: Comment on a Disney film or other production. Use the same structure as last week. Categorize, collect, appreciate. Give some context, both personal and cultural to your comment. What is the importance of the work you are discussing? What is the effect of the work? Where is it positioned in respect to other works in its category?  

Reading and Watching assignment for next week: Please watch Saving Mr. Banks (2013) dir. John Lee Hancock and Mary Poppins (1964). Read the selected texts on the course resource page.

Week Six: The Roots of Hipster

Hipster: noun, Slang.

1.

a usually young person who is trendy, stylish, or progressive in an unconventional way; someone who is hip.

2.

a person, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by a particularly strong sense of alienation from most established social activities and relationships; a beatnik or hippie.

3.

a performer or admirer of jazz, especially swing; a hepcat.

--dictionary.com`

This week we are considering the nature of the "hipster"--possibly an urban myth put into motion by advertising or alternatively, maybe a description of an actual sub-culture. As the Wikipedia article on the term explains, the underlying sense of the reference is to someone who is aware, in the know, hip. 

It's hip to be hip.

Since the 1950s, to be hip has also meant to be cool. In his observations on the mediascape of this period, Marshall McLuhan registered/projected the pattern of Hot and Cool as a significant media effect. What is "cool" is defined as the antonym of what is "hot." 

Reading Assignment: This week we will consider some core works of the hipster canon. From the links below and from this week's selections on the course resources, choose several works and read, view or listen to them. Many of these works are linked from UbuWeb which I highly recommend.

Lenny Bruce in Lenny Bruce
Warning: Offensive language, sexual references and intentional provocation. 

Lenny Bruce brought to mature fruition a style of stand-up comedy that was founded on jazz-like riffs and improvisations, personal experience, social and political commentary and a strong impression of style and attitude. This style was highly influential on most of the major stand-up comedians that followed him. Bruce was provocative in a time of political and social repression in this country. As a result he was frequently arrested for obscenity. 

William Burroughs reading the novel Junkie (1953)

Fuck You: a Magazine of the Arts (1962-65)

The City Wears a Slouch Hat Radio Play (1942) by Kenneth Patchen and John Cage

Maya Deren A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)

The Text of Light (1974) a non-narrative film by Stan Brakhage 

Ron Mann Poetry In Motion (1958) poetry performance film. Classic anthology of beat poetry.

Charles Mingus Live in Belgium, Norway and Sweden (1964) concert/recording film

Jack Kerouac Poetry for the Beat Generation with Steve Allen (1959)

Interview with Painter Peter Saul with some pictures of his paintings.

Diane Di Prima Buddhist New Year Song poem

Poems by Gary SnyderA Dent in a Bucket
Above Pate Valley
Axehandles

Poems by William Everson (Brother Antoninus)
Dust and Glory
The Watchers
We in the Fields

Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Canticle for Jack KerouacAutobiography
Don't Let That Horse
People Getting Divorced

Poems by Weldon Kees
Four Poems of Fourteen Lines
1926
On a Painting by Rousseau
The Umbrella

Alwin Nikolais dance. 
Tribe
Noumenon (1953)

Writing Assignment: Be a cool hunter. Using the three primary elements of the liberal arts, classification, collection, and appreciation, write a blog post that defines the contemporary hipster. Besides an explanation of the category provide a series of links to works that help define the hipster in the 21st century. Write a statement of appreciation for each of the links you provide explaining the relevance and value of the example to the notion of the hipster and to what is hip. This is due next week, Feb. 25.

Week Five: Fiction Indexing Reality

Gia Coppola and James Franco

Reading Assignment: Before coming to class please read short stories in the collection Palo Alto by James Franco. Read as many as you can.

Writing Assignment: Using the worldbuilding based questions we have been applying the last two weeks in our discussion of the novels we have been reading, write a blog post based on one of the questions (or part of the question) and discuss either the novel by Murakami or Jemisin. The idea of this assignment is to make more concrete some of your ideas from the group discussions by putting them into writing. 

In Class: We will watch Gia Coppola's film Palo Alto which is based on some of the stories in Franco's collection. Then we will discuss elements of the adaptation of the stories into film. We will especially inquire into what aspects of the stories did Coppolla incorporate into her work, what aspects you think are important that didn't get incorporated, and what values you think are reflected in the combination of the film and the stories?

Week Four: Visiting Murakami Land

Image above is a remix using a background from Haruki Murakami Bingo an illustration orginally published in the New Yorker by Grant Snider.
  See his regularly posted cartoons at his blog linked here. .

Reading Assignment: This week I am asking you to read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. This is the most recent novel by one of the world's leading literary figures. 

We will discuss the novel in class, much like last week, and I want to apply some the same questions for a portion of the discussion, examining the novel through the lens of world building. These are the questions we will revisit:

What are the primary features of this world--spatial, cultural, biological, fantastic, cosmological? 
What is the world’s ethos (the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize the world)? 
What are the precise strategies that are used by its creator to convey the world to us and us to the world? 
How are our characters connected to the world? 
And how are we the viewer or reader or player connected to the world?”

Link to Paris Review Interview with Haruki Murakami.

Week Three: Writing New Mythologies

Reading Assignment: This week we are reading A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms a fantasy novel by N. K. Jemisin. After having experimented a bit with building our own worlds, we will try to take what we have learned as a platform to begin looking at how Jemisin is building her world. Jemisin is becoming one of the most important authors in the fantasy genre and is one of the most interesting world-builders in contemporary fantasy. 

Her work is different at the assumptive level than the seemingly endless fantasies that are placed in white supremacist, patriarchal, hetero-normative worlds, and her assumptions are very skillfully represented and expressed. In addition, her concepts have a cosmic reach that elevates the experience of reading her work onto an archetypal plane. 

Please read as much of the book as you can before coming to class.

In Class: This week we will be discussing the novel assigned for this week. We will undertake to examine the following questions (feel free to think about them before coming to class):

1. From the syllabus of Junot Diaz for his course in world-building for the Writing program at M.I.T.:

What are the primary features of this world--spatial, cultural, biological, fantastic, cosmological? 

What is the world’s ethos (the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize the world)? 

What are the precise strategies that are used by its creator to convey the world to us and us to the world? 

How are our characters connected to the world? 

And how are we the viewer or reader or player connected to the world?”


2. In the second half of the class I would like to discuss the situation for diverse creators in the current mediascape. and especially the situation for women making genre. 
 
“Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”--Samuel R. Delany from the Paris Review Interview Here

In the Land of Make Believe, Racial Diversity is a Fantasy--Washington Post Opinion Piece

N.K. Jemisin's Blog is Here

Link to Feminist Frequency and Anita Sarkeesian's important examination of the representation of women in video games. 

William Gibson Interview in which he discusses his own world-building and the origins of cyberspace as a locale for fiction.

Week Two: Transmedia Storytelling and World Building

Map of Oz and Nearby Magical Lands

This week we are looking at the frameworks of established transmedia narratives and the dynamics of reading them and adding to them.

Reading Assignment: I am asking you to read one of thirteen other Oz books that followed Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz and that make up his account of Oz delivered from his perch as its Royal Historian. I am suggesting you read The Road to Oz which is pretty useful for our project since it gives you lots of characters to meet. Whatever you read, try to get an a version with the original illustrations. This should give you enough to ground you a little grounding in the Ozverse. 

After you read a Baum book (which won't take long) please browse around some other Oz materials like Oz comics, books that take place in Oz written by someone other than Baum, short stories that use Oz as a sort a mythic framework, stories that remix Baum in unexpected ways. In these works sometimes Oz overflows into a construction of ordinary reality, in others we are once again invited back to visit Oz itself. Try to read enough of several works to get an idea of how approaches vary and what others have done with Oz as a narrative landscape.

Here is a link to page of quotes from Baum. 

Writing Assignment: After you have read some of Oz, I would like you to create your own addition to this world. I would like you to write what we might think of as a tourist's account of a visit to a specific place in Oz. Begin by locating this place in Oz geography. The two maps of Oz reproduced here should help you situate your own account of Oz. 

We are mostly interested in a tour of the landscape and a sense of the characters who you meet there. Please try to include a character or two from Baum's book to help root us in Oz and then please create several characters of your own for us to meet. Think about the way they talk and what they say. Make their speech as unique to them as possible. Give them some actions that demonstrate their character traits. Oz has many characters that show strong contradictory traits, for example the lion is cowardly, the hard metal man has a tender and sensitive heart, the man with a head of straw (later bran) is really clever... Try to create a character or two that have this strong contradictory quality.

You don't have to worry about creating a story or plot, concentrate on just creating a vivid impression of the landscape and the characters that inhabit it. Post your account on your blog before coming to class on Wednesday.

Week One: Type, Stereotype, and Archetype

Reading Assignment: Before coming to class on Wednesday, please read Veronica Roth's Divergent or as much of it as you can. Consider on her approach to character design and on what appears to be the basis of her archetypology. If you have already read Divergent and seen the movie, then read the two short stories in which Roth retells aspects of the story from the point of view of Four. Follow the link to the course resources page in the Course Links box on this page to find resources for this week's reading. 

Set Up Your Blog:  Each student needs to set up a blog of their own on which they will post the assignments for this course. The blogs will be reviewed at the mid-term and and the end of the course as part of the grading process. To see other details about the course, how grades are determined, and the various course policies please read the course information page which is available through a link in the Course Links box. 

Please set up your blog through Blogger or other blog service and email me the URL for your blog. Please do this before coming to the first class. This does not take long. Be sure to indicate that you are enrolled in the Literature, Film and Pop Culture course so that I can make sure I get your blog address posted to the right course blog.

Bring your notebook or tablet. We usually do some in-class writing during each class session so please bring your notebook computer or tablet to class. There are limited charging stations in the classroom so it is best if you charge up your notebook or mobile device before coming to class.