Critical Analysis of Popular Culture
Essay Prompt:
All semester, we have been practicing our critical thinking and writing skills on works of literature. For your final assignment, you need to apply those critical thinking and
writing skills to an example from popular culture.
Pick one example from popular culture that is no older than the start of 2018 . This could be a song, album, television show, film, YouTube video, or computer game. Write an analysis of this work of popular culture focusing on ONE of the following two options:
1) How is this work of popular culture offering something important that can help
individuals or society deal with some contemporary problem? This is a variation
of what you did in your short story essay. How does this work of popular culture
help us engage with or criticize some problem?
2) How is this work particularly innovative and offering a genuinely new
contribution to the culture that is valuable? How does this work differ from
similar works and what is so valuable and important about what it achieves?
Regardless of which option you choose, you should offer a careful analysis and
interpretation of the work that is just as rigorous and academic as in all of your previous papers. That means you should find things to quote and offer a careful explanation and analysis of what the work shows, says, or does. Do not assume your reader is familiar with the work of popular culture, but don’t spend too much time just explaining the obvious of what it is. You need to spend most of the paper arguing its importance or innovativeness.
For plagiarism reasons, you may NOT choose the following
works of popular culture for your paper:
The TV show Euphoria
Logic’s song “1-800-273-8255”
Childish Gambino’s song “This is America”
The Marvel superhero movie Black Panther
Paper requirements:
___The writing must at least reach the top of the page numbered 5 (that is, 4 full pages
and a few lines at least onto the 5th page), not including the Works Cited.
___The paper must have a title, introduction, thesis, a series of body paragraphs,
conclusion, and Works Cited.
___Use Times New Roman size 12 font throughout.
___The Works Cited should have an entry for the work of popular culture. If any outside
sources are used (none are required) such as interviews or reviews, they should be
cited too.
