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treyf 22's List: 22_Model/Sample_Essays
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Dec 17, 07
Anything by Germaine Greer is worth reading.
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The latest sensation to galvanise the torpid lit-hist-crit establishment is the "discovery" by market research analyst John Lauritsen that Mary Shelley did not write Frankenstein …
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(Indeed, what about a series of essays that pairs great novels with a playlist of kindred songs?)... Which brings us to the question at the very heart of the song. It occurs to me that almost all great songs, all songs that get you to play them compulsively over and over again, do so because they've got you seeking something you never find, some haunting enigma that won't quite disclose itself.
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... his greatest role: his own musical and stylistic reinvention. The 16 concept albums that followed, his most remarkable achievement and among America’s enduring cultural treasures, defied public taste and redirected it toward what would be known as the Great American Songbook. With his key collaborator, the arranger Nelson Riddle, Sinatra jettisoned the yearning, sweet-voiced crooning of his Columbia years in favor of a richer voice, greater rhythmic invention, and more knowing and conversational phrasing. He had always said that Billie Holiday was his most profound musical influence, and at Capitol, accompanied by Harry Edison, the former trumpeter for Count Basie, he was even more deeply open to jazz influence, as he invested up-tempo songs (which he had rarely performed at Columbia) with a tough, assured swing. For their part, jazz musicians overwhelmingly selected him “the greatest-ever male vocalist” in a 1956 poll, and Lester Young and Miles Davis—never partial to white musicians—ardently praised him.
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Long disdainful of the diva, critic Carl Wilson travelled to Vegas to check out her show, which ends a four-year run tonight at Caesars Palace. As his new book explains, what came next surprised him
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Dec 20, 07
A very interesting essay about postmodernism and shopping (including retail design) from a very un-postmodern source: The Economist.
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How the shape of modern retailing was both predicted and influenced by some unlikely seers.
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Dec 20, 07
This is an example of a very competent academic essay on the subject of postmodern art. It discusses several specific works as well as some more broad characteristics of postmodernism. It is well-researched, generally well-written (avoiding excessive jarg
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Dec 22, 07
This is an example of a very good essay about Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner from a general-interest source (Slate.com). Compare to Koscianski's essay "What is Critical Postmodern Art?" What qualities and characteristics distinguish the two essays? Note
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Blade Runner: The Complete Ultimate Visionary Final Cut Collector's Edition Is Here!
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Dec 22, 07
This link opens to a search results page from Google with a link to a PDF to download or view in your browser. A good example essay from a specialist but non-academic source, Film Quarterly. Aside from the essay itself, I chose this one because of the tit
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Dec 23, 07
A favorite cultural commentator/reviewer/critic, Howard Hampton's essay on Apocalyspe Now is everything that one could aspire to for your Essay Assignment.
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Of the ten-thousand-and-one things that can be said of -- or read into -- Apocalypse Now Redux, Francis Ford Coppola's reedited, gorgeously restored, three-hour nineteen-minute "Director's Cut" of his most insanely audacious and problematic film, the first and last have to be that Coppola's Doors and "Valkyries" and 'copters Vietnam fantasia remains just as wild and crazy and unresolved after all these years as it was when it was first shown at Cannes in 1979 as a "work-in-progress."
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Jan 03, 08
This essay on the recently built New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York is a model of sober description, analysis, insight and informed opinion.
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Jan 06, 08
One of a series of essays by well-known cultural critic Clive James from his book Cultural Amnesia at Slate.com about various intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape 20th century culture. In particular relevance to your essay assignment, not
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"No no no no no no no no … " —Terry Gilliam, Brazil
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Americans seemed no longer united so much by common feelings as by common images: what binds us became what we stood witness to. No one did or does see this as a good change. In fact, pop-cultural references have become such potent metaphors in U.S. fiction not only because of how united Americans are in our exposure to mass images but also because of our guilty indulgent psychology with respect to that exposure. Put simply, the pop reference works so well in contemporary fiction because (1) we all recognize such a reference, and (2) we're all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a reference.
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I became fascinated by the refusal of Dumas’s art to let me admire it, despite passages of whiplash drawing worthy of Edvard Munch and a quakingly tender way with incidental colors ...
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The perfect apotheosis of Cruise remains Maverick in Top Gun. But before he emerged as the '80s incarnate, Cruise had to kill within himself every tendency to messiness and ambivalence. How do I know? Because before he became the '80s incarnate, Cruise played Joel Goodsen, the neurotic suburban boy of Risky Business. It is a beautiful and authentic piece of acting. To watch his performance today—and you should—is to be present again, not only at the creation of Cruise, the movie star, but at the death of Cruise, an actor bounded by normal human proportion.
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Feb 03, 09
Susan Sontag is a a writer I highly recommend; I've quoted her several times in the course. This is one of a series of influential essays on culture that she published in the 1960's that are still astonishingly fresh and interesting. In this essay she dis
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