Choose one of the following quotations as a starting point for an essay. With direct reference to the work of three of the cultural theorists we have read this term, one of whom must be the author of the passage you choose, theorize one of the following concepts: ideology, mimesis, subjectivity, gender, the culture industry, representation, mediation, hegemony, media, the organic intellectual, text, subversion, the other, race, consumption, signification, nation, parody, multiplicity, the cyborg, the body. Your essay must be no more than 2000 words (6 to 8 typed, double-spaced pages). It must be submitted directly to me (in my office in the Buchanan Tower, room 401) or to the main English Department office (BuTo397) on Friday, April 23, 2010, before 4:30 p.m. There will be no extensions for the due date for this paper. (Please note: there is a scheduled examination time for our class on Friday April 23, from 8:30 am to 11:00 am in Buchanan B 215. I will also be in the examination room during that time, if you wish to turn in your paper then.)

(1) In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because of the standardization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned. Pseudo individuality is rife: from the standardized jazz improvisation to the exceptional film star whose hair curls over her eye to demonstrate her originality. What is individual is no more than the generality's power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such. [. . .] The principle of individuality was always full of contradiction. Individuation has never really been achieved. [. . .] The individual who supported society bore its disfiguring mark; seemingly free, he was actually the product of its economic and social apparatus. -- from "The Culture Industry" by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (in During 414-15).

(2) I come back to the difficulty of instituting a genuine cultural and critical practice, which is intended to produce some kind of organic intellectual political work, which does not try to inscribe itself in the overarching metanarrative of achieved knowledges, within the institutions. I come back to theory and politics, the politics of theory. Not theory as the will to truth, but theory as a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges, which have to be debated in a dialogical way. But also as a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect. Finally, a practice which understands the need for intellectual modesty. I do think there is all the difference in the world between understanding the politics of intellectual work and substituting intellectual work for politics. -- from "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies" by Stuart Hall (in During 44).

(3) To speak here only of borrowing and adaptation is not adequate. There is in particular an intellectual, and perhaps moral, community of a remarkable kind, affiliation in the deepest and most interesting sense of the word. As a way of getting seriously past the weightlessness of one theory after another, the remorseless indignations of orthodoxy, and the expressions of tired advocacy to which we are often submitted, the exercise involved in figuring out where the theory went and how in getting there its fiery core was reignited is invigorating -- and is also another voyage, one that is central to intellectual life in the late twentieth century. -- from "Traveling Theory Reconsidered" by Edward Said (in During 252)

(4) Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. Gender is also a norm that can never be fully internalized: "the internal" is a surface signification, and gender norms are finally phantasmatic, impossible to embody. [. . .] The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effects of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction. -- Judith Butler, from Gender Trouble (in During 381-82).