During our last unit, you crafted a paper describing your chosen artifact for this assignment. We are now moving on to contextualizing your artifact, that is, providing a sense of how it is situated in a broader mediated, social, and popular culture landscape.
This assignment is the second part of your Popular Culture Analysis Assignment: the Context Analysis Paper. You should use concepts from Bitzer’s (1968) Rhetorical Situation article to ground your account of the when, where, why, how, and who of your artifact. Define your terms before or as you use them. The nature and scope of this “landscape” paper will be largely determined by the artifact you have chosen and how you are starting to envision your rhetorical perspective analysis. In other words, although you don’t yet have to pick a rhetorical perspective, you should consider how this context assignment will set you up for conducting a clear and compelling rhetorical analysis using a particular rhetorical perspective (or two) in your third paper. Try to describe the pieces of the context that situate your artifact in ways that will be relevant for your third analysis paper. Please reach out to me if you want to talk more about what this means.
In this paper, you should talk about when and where this artifact was created and put out. Maybe it was put out recently or in a previous generation, but it continues to have purchase. Maybe it was put out at the local (e.g., Colorado), national (e.g., United States), global, or various and overlapping levels. Also discuss the possible “exigences” of this artifact, or what called for its production in the first place. Talk about the platforms it was published on and who created it. What “constraints” (Bitzer, 1968) the platform affordances and creator positionalities create for this artifact? In other words, how do these mediated aspects of the artifact affect its content, form, and reception? Discuss the artifact’s genre. What constraints or possibilities do the artifact’s genre pose? Identify who is or are the target audience(s), or who is meant to consume this artifact and how they meant to relate to it. Are they rhetorical audiences per Bitzer (1968)? What was the audience reception to this artifact? How do you know? Note, constraints in the Bitzerian (1968) sense indicate the limitations on your artifact’s uptake, challenges facing its producers and consumers, and technological affordances that both limit and promote the circulation of and potential interaction with the artifact.
The point of this analysis is to provide a robust understanding of how your artifact fits in a larger “landscape” and whether and to what extent it is providing what Bitzer would have called a “fitting response” to its moment.
Submission Requirements: Your paper should be 2 double-spaced pages. It should be written in Times New Roman (Font 12), with 1-inch margins. For the purposes of this paper, I also expect you to make use of scholarly and/or journalistic resources including books, articles, websites, and the like that provide the texture for your contextual analysis. In other words, you should reference materials that help you tell a story about your artifact. Three to five (3—5) such sources should be used in the completion of this paper. You may submit your paper as a Microsoft Word or PDF document. You may also submit using the text box here.
Grading Criteria: This paper is worth a maximum of 100 points. Your paper will be graded based on the following criteria:
Clear Description of Context (see notes above in the second paragraph): Author offers a comprehensive account of the medium(s), genre,“exigence(s),” “rhetorical audience(s),” and any “constraints” or other elements of context that bear on the interpretation of the chosen artifact. Use Bitzer’s (1968) concepts to ground your analysis and define your terms. As you work on this piece of your paper, remember the in-class group activity we completed and your reflections.
Relates Context to Artifact: Author provides examples, key details, and descriptive phrases from the artifact and other sources to show the relationship between the chosen artifact and its context.
Organization of Paper: Author has included an introduction (with thesis and preview of paper) and formal conclusion (with thesis and review of paper). The paper is structured in a way that makes sense for this assignment.
Writing and Citations: The paper is free of a distracting amount of grammatical errors; its sources are cited using APA or another format you are comfortable using, with correct in-text citations and a reference page. Link to APA format information: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/general_format.htmlLinks to an external site.
Effective Use of Research: Author makes use of 3—5 scholarly and/or journalistic sources to provide support for the interpretive and argumentative claims made in the paper. Making use of sources includes directly referencing, paraphrasing, and quoting from these sources.
As with your previous paper, please save your work so that you can make use of it as you prepare future iterations of this project including the Critical Perspective Paper and Final Presentation + Remix. As always, please feel free to email with any questions.
