Week+11+Discussion+Questions

__**Discourse**__

1) If discourses are methods of distributing power and opening up new realms of knowledge, as Bové seems to articulate in paragraphs two and three on page 58, then do WE use these discourses in our approach to interpreting literature or is the very effort of literary analysis dependent upon an already-existing epistemological discourse?

2) How exactly does a discourse serve as a relay of power and likewise, how is the negotiation of power positions a function of framing within discursive fields? In other words: can we choose to appropriate power through the validation of certain moments in discourse or are we but subjects arising from the play of these discreet historical exchanges?

3) If all institutions and their members are complicit in the structuring and privileging of our cultural discourses, how can those same discourses (those productions and regulations of knowledge movement) serve to destabilize the status quo? What is it about the evolution of a discourse that seems to undermine the very authorities that initiated its line of force?

4) On page 50 Bove said that “For New Critics, “discourse” marked differences and established identities.” How does the New Critic use the power of “discourse” to confine a particular literary genre?

__**Pop Culture**__

1) Fiske states on page 332 that “at least an equal participant in the negotiation of meaning is the relevance of the text to the reader, and relevance is produced by the social interests of the reader not by the text or its author,” does this mean that a reader must make/see some relevance between the text and him/herself to make meaning? How can we explain a meaning accepted by a majority of readers who seem to have very different social interests- how can two very different people find the same meaning say in a Shakespeare play?

2) “In pop culture the text is a cultural resource to be plundered or used in ways that are determined by the social interests of the reader/user not by the structure of the text itself, nor by the intentions of its author” (331). Consider this in discussing today’s pop culture texts- how does this happen? What are some examples? Have past texts of pop culture become high culture and what changes?

3) Near the beginning of his essay, Fiske states that "The ideological norms...are simultaneously rewarded and undermined, and it is in the contradictions between these lines of force that we may trace some of the key characteristics of popular culture" (331). Tying this to the above questions of relevance and cultural plundering, how do we as readers navigate these contradictions? Is it simply a matter of identifying the cultural expectation and then rebelling against it, as in //The Newlywed Game//? Are there other ways in which we work through this dynamic in cultural products? Finally, do textual contradictions reflect an underlying contradiction within "the people" themselves?

4) Do you think there will always be a separation between high culture and popular culture? Are these necessarily defined in opposition to each other or can you envision a total synthesis of the two? Is such a synthesis desirable?

5) Fiske says that “The German playwright Brecht was also influential, though less centrally. In essays such as “The Popular and the Realistic”, he was one of the first to argue that “the people” and “the popular” could be “fighting” concepts. He understood that the people were the driving force of social change and that popular art had not only to appeal to them but that it had to represent and validate the progressive section of the people in such a way that it could take over the leadership.” (pg. 326) What kind of relationship could be derived by this statement between “popular culture” and dominant ideologies of the period?