Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to analyze a music video’s visual and auditory elements and place it in a social and historical context in order to generate original insights.
- You will organize your analysis around an original, succinctly stated theme in a paper 12 pages (double spaced, approximately 3,000 words) in length.
- You will significantly build on and substantially revise paper #2 as you write this paper (see “tasks” below for more context).
- In this paper, you will make an argument about a music video’s genre by vividly describing and analyzing its specific visual and auditory elements and placing it in social and historical context.
- The evidence you marshal to support your argument will be drawn both from your observations of the music video and research you will conduct independently.
- Of course, paper #3 will incorporate revised material from paper #2.
- You may also include discussion of genre in the paper, but it is up to you to decide if and to what degree you do so. Genre may or may not be relevant to your revised thesis statement.
Skills: The purpose of this assignment is to help you practice the following skills that are essential to your success in this course, in art history, at DePauw, and in professional life:
- Develop a research topic, assessing the availability of research materials relevant to that topic
- Assess and revise your own work using feedback from others and your own observations
- Dilate your attention to visual and auditory information, especially details that are not immediately apparent
- Sort and prioritize your observations; generate vivid language to describe them
- Situate cultural material in socio-historical context
- Conduct scholarly research using academic sources as well as popular press materials
- Situate cultural material in socio-historical context
- Engage with scholarly sources in a thoughtful way in your own writing, using paraphrase, summaries, and quotations appropriately
- Synthesize your observations in an organized analytic essay
- Use evidence to support an original thesis, effectively communicating your point of view to a diverse audience
