Tag: popculture

Prime Time Genre and Cultural Difference in Narrative Construction — Or, The Theme of Work in Western TV

gordsellar0 Comments

This week is hectic in part because the biannual Student Presentation Contest is coming up. It sounds more, er, voluntary than it actually is: a contest lends at least a little more of an air of excitement to what is a graduation requirement: every student must give a ten minute presentation to the department. Well, no, not to the department, but to an audience. It turned out that if we actually ran the contest these days the way we did originally, there would be something like 450 minutes of speeches back-to-back, or run over two days, and no human being …

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Bluepill

gordsellar4 Comments

I get an email from my workplace, and what’s the first image in the content? Yup, it’s a scattering of blue pills. Of course, for someone who hasn’t seen or didn’t care for The Matrix, this has no real symbolic significance at all. It’s an appropriate image for the link to an article about the impending launch of a College of Pharmacy at our campus. But for someone who’s seen The Matrix, the Blue Pill has a rather ominous meaning, for Morpheus tells Neo that if you take the Blue Pill, “the story ends, you wake up in your bed …

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Well, I Can See My Work Here Is Done…

gordsellar8 Comments

Well, not quite, but I was feeling rather gratified to know someone out there has been listening to those lectures. After the speech contest orientation (for a contest which is mandatory for our junior-year English Language & Culture majors), one of my students approached me and asked, “Is it possible for me to use things we’ve discussed in our Understanding Popular Cultures class for my speech?” “Well… in what way do you mean?” I ask, wondering whether she means materials, concepts, or actual discussions on texts or films. “I want to talk about sexist and racist discourses in James Bond …

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