Introductions: Theory: Examples: Summaries: Applicaitons: Process:
The reason I like to use popular culture "texts" in 101 is because students generally have a back log of information about popular culture ready to hand.
In order to write about something, a person needs a certain amount of prior knowledge to draw upon. Your prior knowledge is what you have to access when doing an interpretation. The more substantial your storehouse of knowledge, the more informed your reading/interpretation will be. The key for you this semester will be to learn how to bring up the information you have and organize it in ways that will help you write your papers (we will work on this as we go along).
Without such a storehouse of beliefs, knowledge, and assumptions, we could not understand/read anything in our environment. This course will ask you to bring your own assumptions to the fore as well as those behind the "texts" you examine.
These assumptions are behind everything. A shirt, a car, a TV character, a news report, all have signs—messages to be decoded and analyzed to derive meaning.