I'm sympathetic to Graff throughout his essay, but he really wins me over at the bottom of p 72 "Hypothetical students who studied nothing but comics or texts like Vanna speaks would be very unlikely to produce intellectually valuable readings of such texts unless they had also read far more substantial works...(ones) that provided them with models of intellectual analysis."
Right on. I thoroughly agree with the idea of having students examine "lightweight texts" as I find the students are more easily engaged here and if the students are reading the assignments, it's hard to get a conversation going at all. That said we must give students tools to get them to think about this texts in interesting ways.
So here are my top three texts and my top three pieces of guidance:
1. Good Times http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070991/plotsummary
2. The Jeffersons http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072519/
3. The Cosby Show http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086687/
1. James Baldwin "Down At The Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind."
2. Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
3. Henry Louis Gates The Signifying Monkey http://www.amazon.com/Signifying-Monkey-African-American-Literary-Criticism/dp/019506075X
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