Instructions:
– Write a one-page paper, interpreting the meaning of your selected music video by using aspects of the assigned theory.
– You may choose to focus on the lyrics, the music, the visual, or how any of the three relate.
– Format the paper in MLA style, including a works cited page that includes a citation for the primary source being discussed.
Writers can simply and successfully compose these papers by focusing on four questions, one at a time:
1) What does the theory suggest?
2) What key questions does this suggestion spur?
3) What happens in the text under consideration?
4) How can the critic better understand these narrative elements or thematic ideas through the context of this theory.
Sample Writing:
New Historicism suggests that literary critics may analyze a text’s meaning as a reality shaped by the social, political, economic, and technological forces present at the time of its creation. This theory acknowledges the inability for artists to shape meaning in a vacuum of contemporary influences. A new historical perspective approaches the text as an inevitable product of these pervasive forces, regardless of the artist’s intended meaning.
The video for Alvvay’s 2017 song “Dreams Tonight,” incorporates a careful conflation of midcentury archival footage and current shots of the band that carefully mimic the appearance of the archival footage. The visual editing makes all the footage appear taken from the same time and place; as a result, the band appears as part of the midcentury scene. The song’s lyrics reference Eisenhower’s creation of the interstate highway system. The lyrics also twice refer to living life on a merry-go-round, a seemingly overt metaphor for the recursive nature of human experience.
When considered through a New Historical filter, the visual and lyrical elements of this video suggest a contemporary desire to recapture certain midcentury qualities. This reading of the text reflects a currently increasing interest in midcentury art and architecture. This increase may represent a standard cycle of the recently passé eventually ascending into the privileged context of vintage panache. It may also reflect a society’s yearning for a period they perceive as favorable to their own—in this case, a period that appears comparatively simple, stylish, and dreamy.
Sample Writing:
The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham based panopticism on a prison design he developed in the 1700s .The original idea builds on the proposition that knowledge equals power. In Bentham’s design, knowledge depends on the persistent possibility of observation. This idea, however, can evolve into a less literal and a more conceptual understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power. By the mid 1900s, the French philosopher Michel Foucault encouraged this conceptual step by suggesting that observation lacks meaning without language. Accordingly, language and the authoritative discourses it facilitates carry power—regardless of truth.
In the 2008 video for Vampire Weekends hit song, “Oxford Comma,” the viewer encounters a continuous shot that repeatedly calls attention to its own creation—a type of visual meta-discourse that can potentially prime the audience to note aspects of the lyrical content. The lyrics seem to describe Koenig’s interactions with another person who repeatedly approaches him from a position of implied verbal authority.
Koenig suggests confrontation with authority through language when he sings, “Why would you speak to me that way, especially when I always said that I haven’t got the words for you—all your diction dripping with disdain; through the pain, I always tell the truth.” Later, Koenig underscores that this authority need not depend on truth when he sings, “why would you lie about something dumb like that? Why would you lie about anything at all?” Panopticism provides a simple answer to this question: if power depends on language, than sometimes a lie works as well as the truth to establish authority.
Thoughts, Revised & Refined 