• Beware of generalization.  (It's hard, if not impossible, to make general statements about culture.)
• Be text-specific.  (Give specific examples.)
• Be coherent.  (Give a central argument.)

Unit I

Unit II

Unit III

 Cultures: Transmission & Connections 

---

You can choose to discuss an issue related to one of these themes with the support of your own examples.  

• Possible Issues:
• Culture Talk I & II.
• Is quest (religious or Romantic) possible today?  Where do we see most of the quest narratives today?  In what ways are they different from the Romantic quest?  Give specific examples.
• Do today's sci-fi films still express the fears of creation, or creation of a monster?  Explain your answer.
• Is it possible for us (or an artist) to resist economic or ideological determinism?  Is autonomy possible?
• Standardization--In consuming a standardized product, do we get standardized too?  In other words, do we only have a false sense of identity (pseudo identity) when wearing C. Klein?
• Articulation--Discuss how two discourses (e.g. individualism and patriotism) are brought together to exert more control on us.  You can also bring together two texts as a way of analyzing the (trans-)formation, circulation, or travelling of cultures.

• Other poems from The Lyrical Ballads on the rustics (e.g. "Michael", "The Ruined Cottage")
• Keats' Odes
• Other Shorter Romantic Poems on Imagination or quest (e.g. "Kubla Khan" by Coleridge, Immortality Ode & "Tinturn Abbey" by Wordsworth, "Ode to the West Wind" & "To a Skylark" by Shelley, etc.)

•     Different versions of Frankenstein: Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Mel Brook's Young Frankenstein, Woody Allen's Frankenstein episode from Everything you Wanted to Know about Sex but Dare not Ask, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein
•     George Michael's songs 

  ---

1. How is myth created out of certain commercials, ads, or government propaganda?
2. How is subject (subject positions) constructed in a text, a discourse, in the nineteenth century or present?
3. What are the standardized (or popular) images (e.g. of women) in contemporary Taiwanese culture?  What do these images do (construct)?
4. What do images do to the words around them?  Will images substitute words?  Will we be reading images only?
5. What are the relations between discourse, power and subject?  Can you use one discourse to analyze how it produces and circulates power and construct subjects?
6. How do we as reader-critics deal with these myths, ideologies, discourses, images or image culture (sound-bite culture?

Cultures: Transmission & Connections
 

From Romantic Poetry	to Taipei Streets
Quest a. for coherent, growing, unique, and heroic identity  b. artistic creation  c. Romantic love  d. the contradictory roles of female artists and female characters	Migration  Wandering, immigration, exile 　  Cyborg identity in Sci-fi fictions and in daily life In popular songs and soap opera Images of women
Modernist Artist concern with artist's isolation (Bildungsroman) 　  from Modernism to Postmodernism  increasing fragmentation & uncertainties of identity  　  multinational capitalism	Taiwanese Modernism  the influence of U.S. modernism e.g. 1956紀弦的《現代詩》; 1960《現代文學》  王文興《家變》  identity crisis (individual, national)  70 年代──現代詩論戰  鄉土文學論戰  e.g. 鄉愁詩，中國現代民歌校園歌曲

1. globalization or localization
2. Do we need to listen, or study, lyrics in popular songs?