Popular Art Research Paper
Assignment Guidelines
The term popular art is loosely used to describe the kind of literature, music, painting,
architecture, and other cultural matter that is produced for mass consumption. Some popular art turns out to be very sophisticated (Charles Dickens’s novels, for instance), but most popular art is designed to reaffirm and comfort popular attitudes and tastes, not challenge or examine them.
For this paper, choose a relatively “unsophisticated” form of popular art for analysis. When you choose a type, or genre, be sure that it is a coherent genre; not “popular music” but, say, “sentimental love songs of the 1950s” or “goth rock of early 1980s”; not “comic books” but “Disney comics” or “monster comics” or “superhero-type comics.”
Popular art exists in almost all areas, for all kinds of specialized interests. Be sure to select a form of popular art in a field of specialized interests. Be sure to also select a form of popular art in a field you find interesting to begin with.
You can choose a topic from a wide variety of material—from comic books and horror movies to TV shows and bumper stickers and magazines, from Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys to 50 Shades of Grey, from plays by Neil Simon and Sam Shepard, to Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films and Haruki Murakami’s novels.
Your object will be to explore the relationship between your chosen piece of popular
culture and some social issue such as age, race, gender, class, religion, immigration,
etc.
You will be forming an argument about this relationship, a central thesis that will be supported by your evidence. Evidence for your argument will come from analysis or descriptions of the popular art as well as from credible research sources you select.
One requirement of the paper is that you use of at least five research sources; at least three of those sources have to be peer-reviewed academic texts. Focus on the development of ideas rather than on the accumulation of quotes.
Research questions:
Do Breaking Bad and similar television crime dramas make people afraid of Latin
American immigrants?
Are female rappers of the 2020s–for instance, Cardi B. and her associates–modern-day feminists, or just pornographers?
Do first-person shooter video games influence violent behavior?
Do military-themed video games portray Middle Eastern people fairly?
Do “white trash” reality shows slander Americans who live in rural parts of the country?
Was “Gangsta Rap” in the 1990s a valid form of protest against living conditions in the inner city?
Additional sample research topics:
Comic books and civil rights
Climate anxiety and video games
Horror film and gender issues
TV shows depiction of LGBTQ+ experience
Celebrity culture and the American dream
Narcocorridos and misogyny
Portrayal of the Chicano in American film
Rap music and black culture
Alternative music and economic inequality
Representation of people of African descent in visual art
Portrayal of European immigrants as gangsters in 1930s cinema
Jamaican Americans and rap in the 1970s
Cyberpunk and Asian American zines in the1990s
Science fiction and exploration of “otherness
