Instructions

Pick one of the topics below and use it as a springboard for your own analysis, based on your reading of the course material and its key concepts, your tutorial discussions, and your viewing of the lectures. This essay is meant to be analytical, showing not just your familiarity with one or more of the course’s key concepts (e.g., ideology, everyday life, hegemony, manufacture of consent, ideological apparatus, alienation) but your ability to deploy them toward your own analysis. You must also use Two or more of the course’s main readings and at least two additional scholarly sources.

Please avoid ungrounded or declarative statements. Sharing your opinion is not only encouraged but required but should be articulated in a fashion clearly based on the inner logic of the course’s key-concepts, as framed by the topics. For essays on movies, for example, instead of making a qualitative assessment – ‘This is a good movie’ – tell your reader why it is a good movie. And in telling the reader why, base your answer on the material salient to that topic.

Moving from your thesis to your analysis often will have your opinion as a point of departure. Essays should begin with your thesis statement, this is to say, what position you develop based on the framing of the topic. It should be succinct, and the inform the content of the main body of the essay. In turn, you must end with a conclusion that declares either the validity, the invalidity or otherwise of your initial thesis. You may often find yourself writing your essay and find yourself departing from your thesis. In this situation, it may be the thesis itself that has to be altered but should nevertheless be always framed around the specific topic you’ve chosen.

Essays should be double spaced, with 12 point Times New Roman font and one inch margins. Provide a title page which includes your name, your TA and student number and attach a bibliography in either APA or MLA format—see the respective style overviews on SPARK.

Evaluation

Please consult the grading rubric in the course outline. Review the components carefully. The purpose of this analytical essay is to explore your understanding of the course materials, particularly, the function and effect of an ‘ideological apparatus’ and how they help ‘reproduce’ the social order. You must reference at least two course readings. The order of presentation is something you need to think deeply about. What are the questions you are seeking to answer and what is the best order to answer them? A good essay starts with a good introduction. Identify the central question your essay will address, provide the answer that your essay will explore, and outline the different steps you will take to present your answer. Direct textual analysis of course material is key to demonstrating your understanding of the course material—provide references using this format: (Marx, p. 28)

Essay Topics

Using the work of Althusser or Bauman, provide a critical analysis of the ideology of work and/or popular culture in the film Sorry to Bother You. Pay particular attention to how the problems of debt and a hedonistic ethic are related.

Critically analyze Chaplin’s Modern Times through the lens of alienation (Marx). How does the film represent alienation from: the product, the labour process, ‘species being’, and fellow workers?

Provide a film review of any of the four episodes of Adam Curtis’, The Century of the Self. Explain how Freudian psychoanalysis was translated into ‘public relations’ by Edward Bernays and influenced both consumer society and political campaigns.

Using the concept of ‘consumer society’ (Bauman), critically analyze They Live!

Using Weber’s typology of authority and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, analyze the actions and public statements of Canadian political leaders in the context of Covid-19, including but not limited to Doug Ford, Justin Trudeau, and John Tory.

Using the Dissent forum on the family, situate the debate over family abolitionism (Lewis, etc.) in the context of 21st century ideological interpellation. Is the bourgeois nuclear family a hamper upon human development? Are critiques of the family tone-deaf to the importance of family in some marginalized communities? Be sure to link back to Althusser and Lefebvre.

Is Chomsky and Herman’s “propaganda model” still hegemonic in an era of social media, flattened media landscapes and “fake news”? Make use of Gramsci on “hegemony” and provide examples that prove or disprove Chomsky and Herman’s framework from mainstream media within the last 12 months.

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