Popular Art Research Paper
Assignment Guidelines
The term popular art is loosely used to describe the kind of literature, music, painting, architecture, and other cultural matter that is produced for mass consumption. Some popular art turns out to be very sophisticated (Charles Dickens’s novels, for instance), but most popular art is designed to reaffirm and comfort popular attitudes and tastes, not challenge or examine them. Examples of twenty-first-century popular art include television programs, feature films, popular music of many kinds, video games, and many other kinds of media.
For this paper, choose a relatively “unsophisticated” form of popular art for analysis. When you choose a type, or genre, be sure that it is a coherent genre; not “popular music” but, say, “sentimental love songs of the 1950s” or “goth rock of early 1980s”; not “comic books” but “Disney comics” or “monster comics” or “superhero-type comics.”
Popular art exists in almost all areas, for all kinds of specialized interests. Be sure to select a form of popular art in a field of specialized interests. Be sure to also select a form of popular art in a field you find interesting to begin with.
You can choose a topic from a wide variety of material from comic books and horror movies to TV shows and bumper stickers and magazines, from Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys to 50 Shades of Grey, from plays by Neil Simon and Sam Shepard, to Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films and Haruki Murakami’s novels.
Your object will be to explore the relationship between your chosen piece of popular culture and some social issue such as age, race, gender, class, religion, immigration, etc. You will be forming an argument about this relationship, a central topic that will be supported by your evidence.
Evidence for your argument will come from analysis or descriptions of the popular art as well as from credible research sources you select. One requirement of the paper is that you use of at least five research sources; at least three of those sources have to be peer-reviewed academic texts.
Keep in mind not to write a report. You are to add to the conversation by making a claim about your chosen topic. Focus on the development of ideas rather than on the accumulation of quotes.
How to find topics?
• Read reputable news media (websites such as NPR, BBC, ABC, Time Magazine, The Guardian, NYTimes)
• Think about how the popular culture (film, music, literature, radio, video games, etc.) you consume engages in some social issues.
• Do some preliminary research to narrow down your topic to a particular piece of popular
culture and a particular social issue.
Research questions:
• Do Breaking Bad and similar television crime dramas make people afraid of Latin American immigrants?
• Are female rappers of the 2020s-for instance, Cardi B. and her associates-modern-day feminists, or just pornographers?
• Do first-person shooter video games influence violent behavior?
• Do military-themed video games portray Middle Eastern people fairly?
• Do “white trash” reality shows slander Americans who live in rural parts of the country?
• Was “Gangsta Rap” in the 1990s a valid form of protest against living conditions in the inner city?
Additional sample research topics:
• Comic books and civil rights
• Climate anxiety and video games
• Horror film and gender issues
• TV shows depiction of LGBTQ+ experience
• Celebrity culture and the American dream
• Narcocorridos and misogyny
• Portrayal of the Chicano in American film
• Rap music and black culture
• Alternative music and economic inequality
• Representation of people of African descent in visual art
• Portrayal of European immigrants as gangsters in 1930s cinema
• Jamaican Americans and rap in the 1970s
• Cyberpunk and Asian American zines in the1990s
• Science fiction and exploration of “otherness
Requirements
• A well-researched, academic argument that adds a new perspective to the existing conversation about your topic
• A clear thesis statement that advances a specific, substantial, arguable point
• Strong supporting evidence from your secondary research
• In-text citation of at least five different secondary sources (at least three academic
sources)
• A careful evaluation of relevant counterpoints
• A coherent organizational structure that enhances the argument and effectively
portrays the research
• A strong sense of audience
• A clear ethos
• 4-6 double-spaced pages (1,000-1,500 words)
• Works Cited (MLA)
• Meticulous proofreading and proper MLA formatting
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