Giving Yourself Ulcers:
Exploring Culture through Writing (and Vice Versa)

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PROJECT #1 : ANALYSIS OF A CULTURAL ARTIFACT ROUGH DRAFT DUE: September 23, 2004 FINAL   DRAFT DUE: September 30, 2004 This project will give you an opportunity to examine a visual, textual, or spatial artifact to analyze the ways in which it both represents and creates culture(s). By studying the underlying social, cultural, economic, and political values embedded in the artifact, you will be able to trace the outlines of both the culture it produces and hopes to attract. Rationale To analyze culture is to find patterns in the familiar, to engage in a thinking process that is critical and full of hard questions, and to bring to the surface and reflect on the commonplace aspects of what is often taken for granted. Since we are bombarded daily with rhetoric of all sorts - on billboards, road signs, computer screens, television, t-shirts, store fronts, magazines, newspapers, brochures and so on - that serve a variety of social, cultural, business, governmental, educational, and other types of purposes, these artifacts offer a good starting point for analyzing culture. Assignment For this first project you will select an artifact from your current culture (your life). This artifact may be visual (image), auditory (song), textual (story), spatial (public space), or a combination (an advertisement has both text and image, for example... a song has both lyrics and sound, etc.). Choose something that you see is representative of something else in a broader cultural context. Some examples are: a song, a music video, a movie, an advertisement, a magazine article, a brochure, a traffic sign, a billboard, a short story, a poem, your doctor's waiting room, your newfangled cellphone, the packaging of a hairproduct, etc. etc. Your paper, which should be 4-5 typed pages, double-spaced and stapled, should describe your observations, analysis, and interpretation of the cultural artifact you select. It should draw conclusions about its representation in American culture as well as your own. Use CONCRETE INFORMATION to support your points. Sources Use at least 3 outside sources for this assignment. Cite these sources on a separate bibliography page. Also, include a paragraph about each one of your sources. For example, if you used short quotes from 3 different articles, then I want a paragraph summary about each article (so 3 paragraphs total). Use MLA style when citing. If you need help, go to this page for more formatting specifics. Please note that I am not a stickler for MLA formatting. So don't sweat it... if you get a comma wrong or something, it's okay. It's more important (to me) that you ARE citing your sources than that you get the formatting down. Paper Format typed, double spaced last name on every page. Full name on first page. No other personal information required (class name, time, etc.). a title is very important. Be creative. The title should draw me into the content of the paper and not just be a re-iteration of the content. use font size 12 or smaller. use easy to read fonts (Times New Roman is a safe bet) set the margins to be no more than 1.25" your paper should stand alone without the artifact (i.e. it should describe the object it is analyzing before it analyzes it). However, if need be, include a photograph in the body of the paper for clarity's sake. or tape/CD, etc. whatever is needed so I know what you're actually talking about. turn in your final paper with any earlier drafts/freewrites that helped inform it. Let me know if you have any questions!