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Found Objects Report

This mode of assessment is to give you early practice in applying ideas raised by the theoretical essays. You will choose a cultural object (this can be defined in its widest sense) and analyze its modernity or relationship to any element of the modern in terms of the insights raised by ONE of the theoretical articles studied from week 2-4. You could, for example, think of a short story or a poem, but also tourist souvenir, an item of food, a lapel pin, a building or a web site. The only restriction on the object is that it should be readily presentable to the class in the presentation element of this assignment. It would be difficult, for example, to summarize a novel or full-length feature film and then also analyze it in the five minutes or the 1,250 words you are given in the two parts of the assignment.

1. Presentation: 10 marks, Due in Class, Wed 10 September

You'll have precisely five minutes to present your object and your analysis of it to your classmates. I'll appoint a timekeeper who will be draconian, and you'll be cut off after 5 minutes exactly to prevent you trespassing on other people's time. You may usual any kind of visual or aural media you like, but bear timing in mind: if you play a song or a video clip this will be included in your five minutes, while Power Point slides need at least a minute to talk through. Alternatively, you could use no teaching aids at all, but simply pass around an object.

In grading the presentation, I will focus on the clarity and depth of exposition: how you

1. introduce the found object to your audience, giving a context.

2. introduce and apply the conceptual material from the article

Rehearse your presentation so you are relaxed and can manage time well. The key thing here is focus. You'll need to choose a suitable object, and a small, defined concept drawn from one of the articles.

2. Written Text: 10 marks, Due Friday 19th, September 5.00 p.m.

You will write up a conventional essay of 1,250 words on the same topic as the presentation, introducing the object and then analyzing it in terms of the concept chosen.

Writing up the presentation as an essay will give you the chance to rehearse skills necessary for the research paper. Some of these are basic--but nonetheless important: double spacing, an original title, the proper documentation of sources using MLA Style or another consistent style, careful proofreading. Others are at a higher level: the ability to summarize and contextualize both cultural texts and academic writing, for example, and to marshall ideas into a concise package.

One important thing to note is the length required: conciseness is a virtue, and in order for me to compare essays and to devote time to marking them, I need submissions to be of the same length. My general rule of thumb is to allow anything up to about 10% over length; underlength essays will not be penalized simply because of the word count. However, an essay of under 1000 words is likely to lack the depth of an essay that hits the target length; an essay that is substantially over length may well contain more information, but wil be penalized because of a lack of conciseness. Aim for quality, not quantity.

Note that I prefer you to submit written papers to the IVLE work bin. Failing this, email them to me, but in this case ensure that you do receive a response from me and follow up if I haven't replied after two days or so. I'll return marked papers to you in soft copy through your NUS email account: if you do not check your NUS account regularly, make sure you enable forwarding to an account you use regularly so that you receive my comments and a grade promptly.

An Example

If you're still puzzled by the assignment, the following example might help. This isn't by any means a finished product, only some initial thoughts.

The last time I came through Changi airport, I thought about buying a Merlion soap dispenser as a gift for someone:

I ended up not buying one because it seemed rather tacky. This got me thinking about the Merlion as a symbol of Singapore's modernity. On one level it's iconic: the Merlion Tower on Sentosa and the Merlion itself by the Singapore River attract tourists and are featured in thousands of postcards. Yet on another level, many Singaporeans find it inauthentic, shallow, or fake: the word "tacky" wasn't first used by me to describe, it but, by a Member of Parliament. The Merlion, I discover through researching further, is a very modern invention, first thought up by the Singapore Tourism Promotion Board. The fact that it's perceived ambivalently seems to me to have something to do with Partha Chatterjee's observations of the "ambiguous" modernity of the "once-colonized." In a sense the Merlion's an attempt to construct an imagined, mythical past -- the "those days" of which Chatterjee writes. Yet it also seems to indicate something perhaps unique to Singapore: whereas in Chatterjee's Bengal it is possible to have a coherent vision of a pre-colonial past in Singapore, a city-state primarily constituted under colonialism, it is more difficult. Hence the Merlion, subject of poems, architecture, and a whole mythological tourist experience on Sentosa, still in some ways seems "fake."

These are initial thoughts that I'd need to follow though on. For the presentation I'd probably need a tangible Merlion object and some visuals, a sense of the history of the symbol, and would also need to return to Chatterjee to look at his ideas more closely, and to think about how to apply or modify them. I shouldn't forget to "close read" the object itself [why is the Merlion half lion, half fish?] and I will also need to focus on what I take from Chatterjee--it would be best to take a single concept, or a couple of related ones, rather than attempting to address all the issues raised in the article.

Schedule

We'll go in this order, and, as you see, pause after four of the presentations for discussion before resuming. Aim to come for the whole of your panel--unless you're particularly keen to see what everyone else is doing, no need to come for the other panel.

Last updated: 25 September, 2008