21L.015 INTRODUCTION TO MEDIA STUDIES
7 March 1997
 
PAPER 3
The third response paper is due in class Thursday 13 March.
 
As with the preceding papers, papers should discuss documents/materials presented at the lab sessions in light of the relevant readings for the week--i.e., the excerpts of film versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear.; in the second, the historical TV sit-coms and examples of global TV shown at last week's lab. Some ideas for possible topics both for the TV week and the previous week
 
SHAKESPEARE
 
* Compare the film versions of the same scene from either Shakespeare's Hamlet or King Lear, with regard to questions of performance, staging, genre, costume, etc.
 
TELEVISION
 
* Discuss any of the sitcoms in relation to some of the key concepts of the readings, notably Fiske and Hartley's notion of "social-centrality" or Thorburn's notion of "consensus narrative." Consider also how relevant these concepts are to today's very different mediascape of cable and home video.
* Discuss a contemporary TV melodrama (hospital, crime, soap) in relation to the historical series discussed by Thorburn, paying special attention to how the contemporary series resembles or differs from the earlier ones.
 
ORALITY/LITERACY

* Write about one of the following in relation to Ong's discussion of the relationship between orality and literacy, speech and writing:

* Observe one of the following subjects, either in a public place or via a medium of your choice. Analyse the oral performance of the subject, paying attention not so much to content as form and performance: rhetorical tropes, formulas, repetition, gesture/body language, use of media (e.g. microphone, tele-prompter), mode of addressing audience, interaction with audience, relation of the form to the medium of communication. If you are watching a performance on television, it might be useful to turn the sound down at some point during your observation.

mroberts@mit.edu