Critical analysis can be assisted by practices of close reading; close reading here means noticing everything in a text, but it also means not adding “speculation,” “psychology,” or our own opinions, beliefs, and ideology to that text. It means, in other words, making an argument about meaning based on evidence that can be found in the representation itself. Critical self-awareness in this regard means knowing the difference between reading what is there and adding something to a text from one’s own intellectual and experiential baggage. This is not to say that one’s own opinions and speculations have no value, but that it is important to distinguish between those and what is in the text itself.
--Carla Freccero,
Popular Culture, An Introduction
Produce a well-developed argument of approximately 5-7 double-spaced pages.
Your critical analysis can focus on
Amateur City,
D.E.B.S., or
Velvet Goldmine. Remember when choosing your “primary” text that one of your essays must be on a film and the other on a novel.
In presenting an analysis of one of these works listed above, your essay must incorporate at least one of the “secondary” (or theoretical) works we have discussed thus far: Rubin, Warner,
Celluloid Closet, Russ (“What Can a Heroine Do?”), Doggett, or Fowler’s short story.
If you are writing on a film, I expect the same sort of close reading/textual support that should also be present in literary critique. In other words, rather than just analyzing the narrative content of the film, your interpretation of “story” should be supported by attention to film form. Likewise, persuasive literary analysis needs to be grounded in evidence from the novel.
You may use either MLA (8th
edition) or APA (7th) format, depending upon your discipline and what you’re used to using. Make sure to include a “works cited” or “reference” page.
You may wish to consider the following prompts as a jumping off point (also, your journal entries, notes from class, quiz questions, etc, may provide a spark for your idea).
- Consider the “subculture” of glam rock as presented in Haynes’ film in terms of how it speaks about the social context that produces it. If glam rock set out to change the world (as the character Curt Wild suggests), in what ways did it try to change the world? Does it succeed to any extent in the film?
- Analyze
Velvet Goldmine’s
visual style with particular attention to its stylistic split in the depiction of the 1970’s and 1980’s. In what ways do these visual choices reflect on social meaning?
- How does
Velvet Goldmine
queer the detective genre?
- Consider the androgyny and sexuality of the characters in
Velvet Goldmine
in terms of the gender implications and celebration of sexual pluralism.
- Consider the movement from community to isolation for the characters of
Velvet
Goldmine. Brian Slade, Mandy Slade, Curt Wild, and others are able to come together
and create the ‘scene’ for a brief time. What conditions lead to their separation and isolation from each other in the “present” (1980’s) of the film?
- Relatedly, consider the movement from alienation/isolation towards community in the character of Arthur Stuart. In
Velvet Goldmine, is the investigation (to find out what happened to Brian Slade) as much a story about the personal subject formation of the investigator (Arthur Stuart) as it is about broader restructuring and subsequent closing down of social possibilities?
- In what ways does
D.E.B.S.
adhere to and/or disrupt the hegemonic “Love Story” as articulated by Russ as a reigning “cultural mythology”? You might want to compare/contrast the various ways that Fowler’s “The View From Venus” and Robinson’s
D.E.B.S.
tinker with the standard formula.
- Consider
D.E.B.S. in the context of film genre: What kinds of overlapping or diverse generic forms is
D.E.B.S. working within, through, or to disrupt? Does it succeed in revising generic codes? Does it reproduce certain stereotypes and conventions in service of its heroic lesbian love plot?
- Discuss the metaphor of “the closeted” homosexual in any of the texts, or combination of texts.
- Explore the social/sexual/power dynamics of the “Modern Office” in
Amateur
City.
- Examine the logic of the “Other” and how it is played out in the representations of any of the texts.
- Work through the play on alienation and “aliens” in any of the texts.
- Consider any one text in relation to Rubin’s isolation of institutional structures such as the Law, the Family, Religion, the Media and their normalizing discourses. How are these institutional forces represented in the text? What is the price of resisting their imperatives toward normality?
- Relatedly, describe/theorize compulsory heterosexuality, or the tangle of forces that compel subjects toward heterosexuality. Why should dominant culture (feel the need to) compel us toward heterosexuality? What’s at stake in the heteronormative imperative? What’s at stake in a more democratic conception of sexuality? Discuss these issues through the ways in which they are represented in the novel or films.