Hedc teaching and Learning Day



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tarix20.09.2018
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HEDC Teaching and Learning Day

Teaching with audiovisual media

Jules Pidduck, ICR

Teaching recent popular culture: Moulin Rouge & ‘postmodern romance’

Part of a 20-week module on postmodern culture and media


As background

  • Feminist critical accounts of the romance narrative as ideological: the expectation of ‘true love’ & the arrival of prince Charming to the exclusion of broader social issues (Pearce & Wisker, Fatal Attractions)k

  • with reference to aesthetics, postmodern culture characterised by ‘surface’/depthlessness (Andy Warhol), pastiche or quotation, and what Jameson calls a ‘waning of affect’… the loss of the (modern) capacity for deep feeling

I use Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001) as a test case to challenge the students to think about how ‘love’ is articulated in an exemplary postmodern film that both undercuts and reinscribes a traditional romance narrative


Questions

  1. What instances of pastiche/quotation can you identify in Moulin Rouge? How do these quotations inform our reading of the film?

[La Boheme, the Moulin Rouge/late 19th century romanticism & Paris]

  1. What is the effect of ‘love medley’ (a celebration of recycled love songs) for expressing traditional romantic themes of deep feeling?

  2. Does the film ultimately critique the idea of ‘true love’ or reinscribe it?

  3. How does Luhrmann’s scripting of ‘postmodern romance’ compare with other examples from populare culture?


Ups and downs of teaching with and about popular culture

This strategy of using recent popular culture keeps the course fresh



  • builds on the students’ engagement and enthusiasm… the students were excited to look at this recent film (another year I taught Fight Club just as it came out for a module on Screen violence)

  • Teaching ‘personal’ issues like romance, the family using theory and popular culture works well as the students are deeply interested in these questions and they begin to reflect critically on their everyday lives


Challenges for the lecturer: keeping up with recent materials

  • Pedagogical challenge: facilitating critical engagement with ‘favourite things’… students often resist analysing pop culture as facile, or simply as something that they love & don’t want spoiled by critical thinking

  • Students often resistant to critical accounts of popular culture, notably ‘romance’!

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