ENGL 302 B: Critical Practice

This section of ENGL 302: Critical Practice will take seriously the task of theoretically informed interpretive practices by focusing on a form of everyday culture: popular music.  Organized through a week-to-week focus on a specific genre, we will survey a range of scholarship, journalism, essays, interviews, albums, and music videos.  We will apply genre as a framework to think through how music, while hailed as universal or transcendent, can convey racialized and gendered meanings in overt and covert ways.  We will ask: How can a focus on genre reveal embedded historical contexts and cultural tensions that linger in the act of listening?  How do genre categories set our expectations of what (and whom) we’re hearing?  How have artists, critics, and scholars addressed these prescriptive and limiting understanding of genres?

In this way, this section of the course will engage in a continuous application of cultural studies as a method.  On the one hand, we will walk through important frameworks that apply across the study of language, literature, and culture, such as formalism, materialism, deconstruction, new historicism, and reader-response.  On the other hand, we will think about how writing about music engages multiple publics, as well as the relevance of cultural and literary studies toward that end.  Assessments will include the assembly of a portfolio of shorter writings that apply course topics toward original cultural criticism. 

The course will follow the UW’s response to the shifting conditions of the global COVID-19 pandemic, and for now is currently planned to be primarily in-person.  Besides the required course text, course materials will be available through the course Canvas site as PDFs or links, as well as your favorite music streaming service.