Paper 2 |
| the Cul'ture (n) ____________________________________________________________________ |
| the total range of activities and ideas of a group of people with shared traditions, which are transmitted and reinforced by members of the group |
of Desire(n)_____________________________________________________________ |
a wish, a longing a craving for |
Open the Sunday New York Times, and advertisements outpage articles in almost every section. Cruise the internet, and find corporate pitches for business masquerading as information. Go to a football game and watch the play stop time after time for three or four minutes while the broadcasting network runs its ads. Attend a concert, a theater performance, a new museum exhibition, an art gallery, a......and the name of the sponsor claims as much space as the name of the artist. |
Advertising surrounds us, probing our psyches, searching for our insecurities, and articulating our aspirations. Inescapable and strident, the ad. reflects and reshapes the culture we inhabit. For this assignment, choose a single advertisement, an advertising campaign for a single named product, or a genre of advertisements (car ads. for example, or ads. for beauty products, or beer, or...) and analyze it in detail. You may choose either a print ad. or an ad. in one of the electronic media or you may want to follow a single product campaign through multiple media, analyzing the differences and similarities between ads. placed in print and on television, for example. |
The purpose of this assignment is to give you practice in the applying of ideas, theories and insights gleaned from your reading and research to an individual analytical project. In the process of synthesizing others' ideas with your own, you should be able to work towards your own individual interpretations. You should be prepared to apply the insights and theories of at least three writers on advertising to your chosen subject. You may choose writers from the textbook or from material I place on reserve, or research critical material in the library. |
The first assignment asked you to examine your own responses to a single product of contemporary mass culture. In this second assignment, you should retain that focus on individual response but begin to integrate it with the responses of critics and theorists relevant to your own investigations.
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Definition from The Collins English Dictionary (Glasgow 1986) |
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