MIDTERM STUDY GUIDE
On March 11th, two or three of the following questions will appear on the midterm exam. You will be expected to write a response to one of them. Keep in mind that this is an open note and book exam, but you may not bring pre-written answers to the questions.
1. In his 1859 essay The Stereoscope and the Stereograph, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:
Form is henceforth divorced from matter… Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt cattle in South America, for their skins and leave the carcasses as of little worth.Holmes’s comment here is both insightful of the impact of technological changes on our psychological views of reality, as well as prescient—accurately foreseeing changes to come. These changes in technology and perception have led to how we understand style today. Write an essay in which you discuss how specific developments in economy, socio-political hierarchy, technology, art, and design have contributed to our modern notion of style as “something to be used up.”
Use what you have learned from the lectures and All Consuming Images to build your case. Map out these historical changes from the medieval period to our present day in a narrative that speaks to the dynamic relations between the market of fashion and our current culture’s democratic ideals of freedom and individuality.
How is this modern relationship represented through commercial media? How does it function in our daily lives? Draw upon specific examples given in All Consuming Images and “The Ends Justify the Jeans” to portray the tensions between the narratives that are told through advertising and the stories that are left (out) behind them.
2. A French sociologist named Gustave Le Bon once observed:
It is not...the facts in themselves that strike the popular imagination, but the way in which they take place and are brought under notice. It is necessary that…they should produce a startling image, which fills and besets the mind.Stories are not simply facts or fictional occurrences that are strung together without purpose. To be effective, they must strategically employ language, symbols, perspective and a mixture of narrative and dramatic technique in order to encourage readers or audiences to see things in a particular way. In the process, other ways of seeing often remain concealed.
Write an essay in which you talk about the ways that Fahrenheit 451 and Style Wars structure their narratives to provide a particular way of seeing the stories being told and the issues that are being addressed.
How does each text set up contrasts and struggles between “good and evil” in terms of specific characters, ideas and institutions? How are the ideals of free thought and expression defined in each case? How do the two stories seek to influence the audience’s point of view about the role of media in society? Compare Fahrenheit 451 and Style Wars in terms of how successful they are at engaging you as a reader or viewer, and why they are or aren’t successful. For both texts, also discuss the extent to which a calculated “appeal to the popular imagination” has clarified and/or confused what you see to be significant social issues.
Support your argument persuasively. Be specific, citing quotations and or scenes, throughout. Vague generalizations should be avoided. Think about how your own ideas are being “brought under notice,” and how current social conventions influence your thoughts and work.
3. In Frederick Douglass’ account, “Learning to Read and Growing in Knowledge,” Douglass states:
This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man. ’Very well,’ thought I, ‘knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.’ I instinctually assented to the proposition, and from that moment on I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.This statement illustrates the potential relationship between freedom and knowledge. How does his mistress’ ban on further educating Douglass reveal the systemic oppression that Douglass is ensnared in. How does he come to understand and assess both his own personal experiences in slavery and slavery as an oppressive institution? To what extent did reading give rise to Douglass’ emergence as a free man, writer and political leader? Compare Douglass’ and Frankie Mae’s experiences in terms of the acquisition of knowledge.
Based on the readings, lectures and discussion sections, do you think that access to knowledge does have the potential to challenge and/or disrupt the status quo? Using an example from your own experience explain why and how.
4.
The photograph has an added realism of its own; it has an inherent attraction not found in other forms of illustration. For this reason the average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photography is often rudely shaken. For, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.- Lewis Hine, “Social Photography”
People tend to see images and words as different things. Words are often viewed as open to interpretation, yet images are viewed as self-explanatory, speaking instantaneously and without an agenda.
Write an essay in which you discuss photography as a medium that defies interpretation and encourages us to view it as a record of something that is true. Cite examples from Oliver Wendell Holmes’ essay, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” and Lewis Hine’s essay, “Social Photography.” Using the descriptions of photography discussed by Holmes and Hine, describe the problem of visual truth.
Using a specific example, discuss how modern advertisers use the instantaneous power of images to market their products. This example can come from ads shown in lecture or discussion, in the reading, or you may bring in an ad that you have found and include it with the exam.
5.
“No, I ain't running the system, I'm bombing the system.” -Skeme, Style Wars
Much of our work in this class has been focused on understanding the conflict between official and vernacular culture, beginning in medieval Europe and moving through modern cultural movements like hip hop and graffiti. These cultural conflicts both created the need for, and shaped the development of mass media. Using our lectures, readings and discussions, write an essay in which you describe two specific cultural conflicts where print or image mass media served as a tool for the reinforcement of power or as a tool for disputing the system of control. In each case, be sure to describe the cultural, political and economic context in which the conflict was occurring, and how this conflict both may have transformed the culture, as well as any internal conflicts that may have existed. What kinds of conclusions do you draw regarding relationship between consuming media, creating media and social change?
6. In Jean Wheeler Smith’s story, Frankie Mae brings up her accounting figures to compare and contrast with those of Mr. White Junior. He replies,
“Long as you live, bitch, I’m gonna be right and you gonna be wrong. Now get your black ass outta here.”Write a well-substantiated essay in which you discuss how different media have been controlled and shaped both by hands that are invested with social authority (and those that are not) to affirm and challenge relations of power throughout history. Use specific examples taken from at least three of the following to illustrate your argument: All Consuming Images, Frederick Douglass’ “Learning to Read and Growing in Knowledge,” John Ross’s Exercises in the Restoration of History, and the film Style Wars.
7. In writing about photography, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed
“We have the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core.” According to Holmes, photography has
fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.
Write an essay in which you explain how the invention of photography contributed to the refinement of a previously long desired effort to reproduce “visual” truth, as measured by the index of the human eye.
Explain how photographic reality and earlier visual forms that anticipated it contributed to the transfer of value between concrete items (land and physical possessions) to abstract representation (money and images, for example). In addition to Holmes, use three specific examples from All Consuming Images in developing your answer.
8. You are a film reviewer. Write a review of the film The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords in which you discuss the film in relation to the history of print as it has been covered in class and in the readings. Focus on two or three of the newspapers depicted in the film (the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, etc.) and relate their particular stories to the broader history of the relationship between language and power.
Be sure to use at least five specific examples taken from these newspapers in developing your review-essay. As a reviewer, discuss the extent to which the method of storytelling in the film serves its purpose. (A transcript of the film is available at: http://www.pbs.org/blackpress/film/fulltranscript.html)
9.
“As style reached out to a more broadly defined ‘middle class’ of consumers, the value of objects was less and less associated with workmanship. Material quality, and rarity, more and more derived from the abstract and increasingly malleable factor of aesthetic appeal.” - Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images
As a result of mass-produced goods style works fast and travels easily. Mass produced goods are dressed up to signify their elite predecessors. “Believable imagistic fictions” (All Consuming Images) become commonplace in Western Europe and the US. The possibility to merge ideal image with objects (readily available, affordable products, permanent images of oneself etc) creates a tension between what something appears to be, or its skin, and its substance. Goods are created not just to be used but to signify. With the mass produced goods now available to a larger group of people, a new servitude towards appearance develops.
Write an essay in which you discuss the ways that mobile, marketable images contributed to a society that was both more democratic and more superficial. Discuss in particular the role played by photography, fashion, mass produced goods and money in influencing this development. Make specific reference to at least five examples taken from readings, images shown in lectures and discussions, and the film Style Wars.
