Course Description

This course will focus on understanding popular music from the perspective of literary, rhetorical, and cultural theories. The course will address close listening for musical elements such as song structure and instrumentation; examine how lyrics operate rhetorically through troping, rhyming, and repeating; think about the relationship between creativity and rhetorical situation; analyze how music connects with an audience rhetorically and affectively; work through the relationship between sub- and fan- culture; theorize the racial and gendered ramifications of musical expression; and discuss the economical and technological mediations that influence music production. Throughout these discussions, the course will emphasize the critical approaches being taken over the particular genres being examined. Early in the semester students will identify an artist or genre that they will examine over the course of the semester using these critical approaches. Toward this end, students will be expected to do the readings diligently, write weekly in response to readings and to music, do a mid-term project with corresponding class presentation, develop an ongoing research approach, and produce a final research paper that critically analyzes a song, album, artist, genre, or scene of their choice.