Due on June 10th/July 8th, by 5pm
Submit it via email to maran@nagoya-u.jp
NOTE: if you have NOT received my confirmation mail after your submission, mail me again; my university mail sometimes is not compatible with your mail system.
30% Reading Journal (15%x2)
BASICS
1) Students are expected to submit TWO 250-300 word reading journals (in WORD document; can go over the word limit) reflecting upon their reading progress in the previous month (1st Journal to review the literature by Week 7; 2nd Journal to review literature until early July);
2) For each assignment, you should engage with at least ONE reading listed in our syllabus for the designated period of time, and focus on a very specific topic/research question (e.g., ‘modernity’; ‘flaneur’; ‘monuments’; ‘the uncanny’; ‘the other and Zainichi experiences’ etc.); other sources are welcomed but not a must at this stage
3) The submitted WORD file should contain “CITY” + the student’s name in its file name; otherwise it’d be difficult to track your work;
4) Preferred referencing style is Harvard (a link of the style has been embedded in the first post in our course blog). Please self-study the style (Citation Tools will help you to do the job effectively!).
5) I am fully aware that some of us are not from the Humanities. Why not take this as a chance to exercise and try?
Don’t be overly concerned with grammar (although spell-check will be helpful!), but do put a lot of thinking into your reading journals since they will be key to fruitful discussions in class and even your final paper.
FORMAT Include the following information at the top of each assignment:
Your Name
Course Title
Submission Date
Title of article [please do NOT use the bibliographical item as your title…]
Mainbody
Works Cited
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What We Want?
This Reading Journal is a simplified version of Literature Review (if you do not know what is ‘literature review’, refer below); we use it to keep updated about your learning progress, and get to know your understanding of the critical theories and discussions on certain film studies-related concepts, contexturalised and historicized. You would get my feedback on your assignment in the Google Cloud.
I’d rather you start from something small and more specific, and orient your discussions AROUND the readings themselves, NOT communicating your own feelings and evaluations (NOT I feel blahblah…this is the very basics of academic writing in humanities), NOT the random impressions of certain texts=we want to read how you support your discussions with “evidence”. Again and again, we DO NOT WANT a summary of ALL the readings (please do NOT do that) =you do NOT have to cover all the issues discussed under one singular theme.
How?
You are expected to review, evaluate and even critique certain theoretical concepts (such as keywords proposed by scholars) and/or arguments (much detailed explanations) presented in the cited sources; you should be able to present your own interpretation and viewpoints (instead of simply copying and pasting quotes). Further relevant analysis of case studies (visual materials/films) etc. will be welcomed but NOT a must at the stage (given the length of the assignment). For your Final Paper, you are encouraged to develop some of the underdeveloped ideas presented in the Reading Journals, by engaging closely with the case studies.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY… ‘LITEREATURE REVIEW’
A literature review … has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis. A summary is a recap of important information about the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information. It might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations. Or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates. Depending on the situation, the literature review may evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant of them.
Sample of a Reading Journal (only part of it) by a non-native student for your reference, not about the content, but about how to construct a Lit review/for any questions on the Journal, write to Ma Ran, and you can make appointment to ZOOM me too:
In his 2018 book The Culture of Surveillance, David Lyon raises a crucial concern that our modern society has not become the surveillance dystopia as predicted by George Orwell, but instead naturalized a “surveillance culture”, where “people actively participate in and attempt to regulate their own surveillance and the surveillance of others” (Lyon, 6). While the prevalence of technologies and interactive social media platforms have facilitated the phenomenon, scandals of misinformation or violation of privacy in recent years and the flagrant continued expansions of the tech companies have hardly fazed users to abandon using social media in everyday life. Lyon points out in his contextualization of digital modernity that media and technology have caused a cultural shift towards performance, as a response to individualism and hyper-transparent social relationships. While it is contemporary and ever-shifting, how can we understand this notion of performance on a more basic level?...(OMITTING THE MIDDLE PART) The other side of the performance is of course the audience. We spend a significant amount of our time looking through our social media feeds, seemingly indifferent to the daily contents in accord to Barthes’ theory of studium, the general interest and understanding in photographs. “To recognize the stadium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions”, and the primary intention of social media is the plainly unspoken intention to broadcast and to make one’s life seen (27). So similarly, we educate ourselves about the individual person, and in a broader sense, about engaging with society from the perspective of a photographer.
(247 words)
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