Homework due Monday, Feb 16

The reading for this assignment is "On Reading a Video Text" by Robert Scholes, on page 369 of "A Reader for Writers".

In this essay, Scholes talks about ideology and cultural narratives. It is a short essay, but very dense with ideas and theories you may not be familiar with. If you are having a hard time with these concepts, I suggest you check out the wikipedia articles on ideology and metanarrative (which is similar to what a cultural narrative is).

Scholes, to give an example of American cultural narratives, analyzes a Budweiser beer commercial about a rookie umpire. Here is that commercial (isn't YouTube nice?):



Your homework, then, is to do the same thing, in your blog. Find a video of a commercial or a music video on YouTube, embed it in a blog post, and write a short analysis of it similar to what is done in the reading. You will have a chance to revise this later if you have some difficulty with it. (This kind of writing is similar to what I expect you to do for your Genre Portfolio assignment, FYI.)

For tips on how to embed a youtube video in a blog post, click here.