Group Popular Culture Project

This creative project allows us to experience the immediate social context in which the novels are written, and see the direct relevancy of the literary artistic genius. The keyword for the project is "enjoyment": the more fun you have with the ideas, the better (ceteris paribus) your result will be.
 
The project is worth twenty percent of the course grade and thus presumes that each group member will put twenty percent of the course effort into the project: i.e. each project will display 2 X 20% of course effort.

• Groups of two will be set course week one
• A trial 'run through' of the project will be done course week one.
• Your group will sign up on week two for your preferred week to present their project in class.
• In line with the information given in lecture over the first two course weeks, your group will look for some aspect of popular culture which shows one of the following:
• enfeebling or disparagement of maleness.
• female dominance or empowerment.
• [Lecture will be considering the efficacy of Charles Darwin's model of maleness and femaleness—centred around the fundamentally performative and therefore necessary uncertain nature of masculine identity—to understand the artistic representations in the course texts.]
• Some aspects of popular culture that you might consider are advertisements, television shows, university course transcripts, public speeches and policies, film, magazines, etc.
• Put together a fifteen-to-twenty-minute creative presentation that informs the class about what your selection from popular culture is specifically saying (the analytic component), and what the significance is for cultural conceptions of masculinity or femininity (the thesis component.)
• Choose a clear and consistent creative format for your presentation. Some possible alternatives are as follows:
• visual and oral presentation
• handouts
• performance (i.e. re-enactment)
• filmed documentary -- on DVD for instance.
• artistic: e.g. a comic book or screenplay.
• etc.
• Choose the mode of your presentation: humourous, polemical, satirical, scholarly.
• Give equal weight to the creative, informative, research and audience-engagement aspects of your project.
• Hand in your presentation materials (e.g. overheads, notes, and similar), and an evaluation sheet and assignment grade will be handed back to your group the week following.