Analyzing the Psychological Effect of Color on Response

First, let's read this webpage from the art department at Cornell University . . . and list some of the points we find provoke our thinking of the psychological effects of color on the reader/viewer.

Other things that will be important to our writing analysis:

• proportion of a certain color in painting to other colors
• the "value" of the color --> how dark or light a color is (lighter blue (afternoon sky) to darker blues (midnight's navy))
• the "hue" of a color --> how close the the primary color the color is. In other words, color is more mixed with another primary (like pink, teal or aqua).

Writer to Writer: have fun in clarifying colors--> write to allow your reading audience to visualize the exact value and hue of the color you see in your head.

• What is a "real" object that you often associate with the color? (fire-engine red; school-bus yellow, swamp green, midnight navy, etc.)
• What kind of texture does the color have for you? Is it flat, fuzzy, heavy, light, etc?

Our main goal in doing the activity that follows: to practice articulating (through writing, of course) how the color choice affects our emotional reaction to a painting. We are exploring the connection between our heart and our brain; our feelings and how we create them.

Writing Activity (40 minutes of silent writing! To be handed in)

What is your emotional reaction to Pablo Picasso's "The Old Guitarist"? In writing, analyze your emotional emotional reaction to the piece by focusing on Picasso's use of color. Within your analysis, you will have to describe the focal image, of course, but I want you to explain how Picasso's use of blue helps you come to take meaning away from the painting. Imagine (and discuss) how your emotional reaction might be different if Picasso had used a different color -- like red, yellow, or green.

Be creative in the way you discuss the color, and use the characteristics outlined above (texture, proportion, hue, etc) within your analysis.

Bonus Response (up to 5 pts make-up)

Due: This assignment cannot be turned in later than Tuesday, March 2nd, being bonus and all!

Prompt: Go to the Art Institute of Chicago (there's free admission until the end of February!), and make your way to the Modern Wing. Choose a painting that emotionally and intellectually speaks to you.

What characteristic or characteristics of the painting are causing your emotional reaction? The use of colors (in what way), the proportion of images, the image itself, is there provoking text, the size of the piece, and any other stylistic/artistic choice the painter has seemed to have made. Your guiding principle and thesis should clarify what characteristic is most important to your comprehension of the painting.

Furthermore, work on the accuracy in your description of the painting. The weaker the description of what you see, the weaker the analysis will tend to be. . . . Have fun trying to re-paint the painting, through your words, for your audience!

Out of the five points available, one point is reserved for you taking a picture of the painting (preferably with you in it!) and attaching it to your paper (or e-mailing the pic as an attachment to me by Tuesday's class). Otherwise, the bonus is only worth 4 points maximum.

Expanding How We Think: Going Global

One thing that we need to do more of as writers is to spend more time writing out our own ideas. As I reflect on our time together, the one thing that we need to practice the most is including our own voices and ideas more into the text.

Most of us are still struggling with the concept of writing from sources. That "from" is neglected in our writing. We are not solely writing "about" sources; we are using sources to inspire our own ideas. Too often we fall back to simply restating what the authors have already said.

If all we are doing is restating, then we are being too obvious and missing the point. Our goal for the final four weeks (7, 8, 9 & 10) is to write, write, write! But, we are going to write with purpose. We are going to write to make our own ideas sharper, and to illuminate ideas beyond what anyone who has read a text might not get from their own reading!

Writer to writer, the biggest failure of a piece of writing is that it doesn't attempt to take the ideas already in the world (already written and read) and further them. The biggest failure when responding to a text -- whether an essay, a film, a song, a painting -- is to not go beyond restating what the text already explicitly states. We are not computers; we are not writing robots!

Our goal in using sources is to spend most of the writing, not on restatement of the text, but on why and what we see as significant from that text. What has the text taught you as a reader by making you think? What has the text taught you that is beyond what is already on the page?

With this goal in mind, here are the exercises that we will do today in class. (The exercises that we don't get to, you can still use.):

Thinking/ Writing Activities

Writing Activity 1 // Anticipate Questions (Writing By Thinking about GP):

Have faith in your own intelligence. Ask yourself what kind of questions you would ask over the given material. Chances are that at least some of your questions when answered by you can be considered analysis. If you can anticipate questions readers will have and answer them, then the more your reader will keep following you.

• What questions would you ask about the song and its lyrics based on the guiding principle used?

• As an example, using the following Guiding Principle to ask questions of Bob Dylan’s 1975 folk classic, “Hurricane.” Based on the guiding principle, what questions might you want to pose on Dylan’s song?

The sociologist R. Serge Denisoff was among those who observed that the majority of protest songs of the 1930s and 1940s differed from those of the next generation. He called the earlier songs ‘‘magnetic,’’ expressing collective feelings of unity and ideological power in a time of general economic depression. By contrast, he believed that the majority of the protest songs of the 1960s, a time of middle-class affluence, were ‘‘rhetorical,’’ expressing individual feelings of formless discontent with particular issues.

(Dunlap, 550)

1. After we discuss some questions to anticipate for Dylan's song, I'd like you to spend 15-20 minutes on your own essay.

• First, come up with two to three questions a reader might ask about your song lyrics based on your guiding principle.
• Second, answer each of the questions -- if you do this, you are practicing analysis!!!

_____________________________________________________

Guiding Principle Practices: shift what you say according to different guiding principles…which lines become more relevant? Here are some (but not all) examples of different topics for which one might find a guiding principle. For each topic and its guiding principle, each would shift what you discuss on your subject.

• racial ills of society
• feminism in language
• originality of the language's structure
• originality of how the subject is described/ overuse of common phrases
• use of a new metaphor/ old metaphor
• the point of view on the topic (Dylan and folk music article)
• how does the song discuss a historical "fact"

You may find a guiding principle from an outside source that discusses on of the above subjects, or you may be RISKY (that's good) and make your own.

Writing Activity 2 // Create Your Own! A Confident Writer Might Not Need To Borrow a Guiding Principle (How do you think Guiding Principles become GPs?!?)

- Guiding Principles can be original thesis statements on a subject, they don’t have to take someone else’s ideas and try to apply them to a new subject!

- A self-created guiding principle/thesis statement is one that makes a larger claim about subject text that is not explicitly already stated.

- Another way to look at your Guiding Principle is that is is a tool that allows us to see the subject in a new way; it is a tool that allows us to learn about the craft of the subject….

o Use your intuition --> learned to want to think more deeply about your text. Take the risk and look like a donkey! For instance, if you are listening to a song and you have a thought that, wow, this song uses a lot of metaphor, and as we said, start to explain what you think the main metaphor is, etc.

WA 2.1 // Metaphorical Value of the Lyrics

• What is the metaphor used? What’s being compared to what? (Love is a Battlefield à how so, Pat Benatar!)

• Why this metaphor? Does this seem appropriate, and how? Explain.

• Is this a different view than others have taken on the subject? (Again, love is a battlefield – battlefields are violent, they involve two sides, people die or lose parts of themselves. No one really wins or loses, but there is pain….)

• How much of the song is metaphor? Is it one or two lines, or is the whole song a metaphor? Which line? What does the line mean, in your words?

• Again, why this metaphor? How fresh or stale is this metaphor? Have other artists used the same metaphor before?

WA 2.2The Literal Argument

• What have other writers said on the subject – in this case, song/song writers?

• Is this a conventional argument – one that many have made – or is it new? Be realistic, as many songs make the same arguments over and over.

• If the argument is not new, then what about the song makes it so popular?

• What can someone learn from reading/listening to the lyrics?

• In other words, what value does this song have to humanity? What is the purpose of the song, and how does it accomplish its goal through its argument?

WA 2.3 The Emotional argument of the lyrics

• What is the common expected emotional reaction?

• What in the song's lyrics indicates how the listener is to emotionally react? Certain phrases, certain lines…which ones?

• Is this emotion often used in this genre of music? (For instance, another Tupac Song, “Dear Mama,” could make one tear up!)

• What is so interesting* (or significant) about which emotion the song provokes? (

1. For example, I could write about how unlike the stereotype of rap “Dear Mama” is in terms of its emotional argument. Where anger is often directed outward, the singer actually blames himself and looks angrily at himself…)

*Your own reasons and logical explanations need to be clarified. Explain how you see the song as relevant to society...All of the questions posed, when answered thoughtfully, can be considered analytical writing!

Writer to Writer

Guiding Principle: it doesn't matter if you find the 'guiding principle" first, or have your song. Either way, you need a guiding principle to help you express your own thoughts about the relevance of the text you are writing on.

The 'guiding principle' is a global theory/concept/idea from a professional authority that you use to focus your own audience on how to look at your local subject.

The 'guiding principle' is the match that lights your candle. The 'guiding principle' allows you to see your subject out of the shadows. The 'guiding principle' allows you to give form to your own ideas.

For example, pretend that famous lit critic Harold Bloom said that most literature of the 1950s was anti-feminst and showed that Americans valued women only as homemakers. I could apply his idea to reading a novel from that time period. I could write an essay analyzing whether it proved or disproved Harold Bloom's theory. Bloom's theory guides me to discuss the novel in terms of its feminist or anti-feminist themes!

Find A Guiding Principle

For your own essays (and whenever you are asked to analyze a subject), you will want to find a guiding principle that helps you express larger ideas about the text.

In regards to Response 3, you will want to use a "guiding principle" that relates to the subject of the song, and perhaps one that theorizes on music itself.

To find:

1) Where to look? Search for articles on your local/ library database.

2) What to look for? Look for texts that do exactly what you are supposed to do in your own assignments. In our case, you are analyzing music for social relevance. So, look for an article/text that is analyzes music and society.

• search "music" and "society" and different forms of this word. I searched for "music theory" and "culture" on Columbia C's library on-line catalog.

• You might also enter in search terms that deal more directly with your song's subject (love, teenagers, abuse, infidelity (cheating), ethnicity (Mexican, Latin, African, European, Caucasian), type of music (hip hop, pop, disco, techno, rock, etc.).

• When you attempt to find an article that will help inspire your own writing, you want to give yourself as many search terms as you can. You never know what kind of cool texts are out there, written by professionals in the academic disciplines -- like you, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and even chemists love music, and often someone in their field has written an article on music and its relation within their field.

Writing Activity: Questions & Considerations To Answer In Your Analysis

You are going to spend time, in silence, writing out answers to the questions provided on the guidelines handout for Response 3. Only, I want you to consider two more things as you are writing out your answers:

1) Point of view / tone the singer takes --> good writing takes into account and incorporates not only what is being said, but HOW what is being said is to be taken. Work on adding this into your analysis. (There is a difference between "I", "we" and "they." What are the implications of the point of view taken? Is the writer including her/himself, or are they speaking out against someone?)

2) Pay attention to your own verbs and modifiers! Work on being creative with your verbs by experimenting with tonally-appropriate verbs in your discussion of the songs.

• Instead of using bland verbs like "sings" and "raps" try to use verbs with emotional/intellectual layers --> "mourns," "meditates," "screams," "exults," "rattles," etc. Nail down your analysis by nailing down the tone with the use of verbs that emphasize the way a song is sung!

• The same goes for using adjectives and adverbs in discussing lyrics. Are notes stretched out or sped up. Reflect upon how a line is sung and how that adds to the meaning of the lyrics!

Response 3: Lyrical Analysis

Due: Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010, ready to hand in at the beginning of class

Worth: 5 pts = 5% of final grade

Guidelines:

- Three well-developed paragraph, double-spaced

- 12 pt. font; Times New Roman font.

- Title that creatively informs us about which song and theme are analyzed

- MLA Citation used (page #) at end of ALL cited material. Plus a Work Cited page.

Prompt:

The main purpose of this essay is to make one analytical claim on the social relevance of a song, specifically the lyrics. The term ‘social relevance’ is used here to mean that the lyrics are impactful to a larger audience – an audience you will define.

Some general ways a song may be socially relevant include: the lyrics make a political statement, cultural awareness /identity, the expression of a common human experience. Your job in writing the analysis is to explore how a song makes an impact on an audience – what do the songs lyrics say on a subject, and how is their argument that listeners will “buy.”

For example, Bob Dylan’s song “Hurricane” was socially relevant because the lyrics told the story of a black man wrongfully accused and jailed for a murder he didn’t commit – it was a song outraged by racism and wanted people to meditate on the injustice. If this were my focus of analysis, I would spend the entirety of the essay discussing how the lyrics enlighten its listeners on the events of the night and how the injustice comes out of the plot.

The structure of your essay: one intro paragraph with a guiding principle, one body paragraph that develops one analytical point about the lyrics, and one conclusion paragraph that brings back the guiding principle and main point in body.

Critical Thinking Points

- What is the subject of the song?

- In what way does the song take a different approach on the subject?

- Does the song tell a specific story (like “Hurricane”), a general story that could be anybody, or does it speak for a specific group of people (like “God Bless the USA”)?

- What is the song’s major theme? Some songs have wide-ranging themes (such as Tupac’s “Changes”) and some have a narrower theme (like Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper,” which is about suicide).

- How is the song’s take on its subject and themes different from other songs?

The Universality of Music

As we shift to analysis of texts as our major focus for the second five weeks of the term, we will use three different forms of media -- music, TV/film, and finally advertisement -- to practice integrating academic concepts/writings into our responses to these popular mediums.

Our first goal is to see these mediums as alternative texts that we "read," and to also see the larger artistic and cultural statements implicated in them.

Our second goal is to dissect each of these alternative texts into individual rhetorical parts to understand what their statement is, and how they do so.

Our third goal is to connect the individual statements of a text to larger "academic"/global disciplines. In other words, we are working towards making a connection between the themes and ideas present in an individual text to those in the larger fields we will ultimately work in.

For example, our first voyage together will be examining music. Beyond entertainment, why do we listen to music? What does our music say about humanity; about us as individuals? What can we learn by dissecting a song? Well, if we take a fun but serious look at song lyrics, we may be able to uncover sociological, psychological, political science, gender studies, even physiological/biological understanding.

To begin our voyage as a class, let's look at Tupac Shakur's globally-popular "Changes."

• The song lyrics

• Cultural implications, even today! Shakur's song made the Vatican's mySpace playlist!

• Here's another link, from CNN, that mentions a few other songs on the Vatican playlist.

• Here is the YouTube music video...

So, after we discuss the above links, and dissect the song together, let's look at the songs that we brought in for today's class!

• What song did you choose?
• What genre(s) would you say your song belongs to: love song, political/social issue, elegy (commemorates the dead), adolescent rebellion, psychological struggle, or some other genre that you can "see"?

Writing Activity

• Beyond entertain, what else does the song do for you?
• Which particular line or a few lines really exemplify the song's meaning?
• What do those particular lines tell us about the singer's point of view on the subject of the song?
• What are some larger ideas about life that we can take from the lyrics?

Homework:

• For Thursday, bring back both your song lyrics, and what you wrote today...

• You may also bring in an article that "discusses an important idea about music." This last statement is intentionally vague. I'd like you to use your critical thinking skills to find an article that you find will be relevant to analyzing music lyrics! We'll start discussing ways of getting outside research, and on-line databases is one avenue.

1. One place to look for an article, if you have a Chicago Public Library Card is their on-line databases...
2. Another place to find an article is the East-West U. library databases.

• Search these databases with terms that relate to themes/ideas you are dissecting in your analysis of your song lyrics. For example, in looking for sources that may help me analyze Shakur's "Changes" I might put together a search of these terms, mix and matched: politics, music, race, racism, war, music, protest, rap, drugs, social ills, violence, media portrayal,. . . .

2/9: Laying Out Argument & MLA Citation

Laying Out Your Argument Synthesis

• Looking at the essay as an exploration of your argument's main ideas
• Outline of Essay Form: thesis --> arguing thesis sub-topic* 1 --> arguing thesis sub-topic 2 --> arguing thesis sub-topic 3 --> arguing sub-topic 4 --> etc. --> conclusion does not definitively prove but does reiterate importance of your argument

*sub-topic is another term that refers to the thesis statement's associated ideas.

• Outline of Each Body Paragraph: topic sentence that makes a claim on thesis --> supporting sentences that develop claim more and then provide supporting example (textual evidence) --> a few sentences that provide an "assumption" of what claim and support equal, or what the claim and support "mean."
• If a developed body paragraph were a math equation, it would look like this: claim + support of claim = meaning/assumption.

Now, these two above ideas are basic/foundational rhetorical knowledge. The key is to practice. So, we will spend today working on sharpening our use of the basics.

Writing Activity 1: Developing Logical Sub-Topics of Thesis

• Why did you say "that"? Write some sentences that provide reasons why your thesis argument is true. Start off: "Folktales exist to replace verb phrase because..."

• When is your thesis true? Write a few sentences that clarify specific times your folktales have been shown to exist.

• Where are folktales found to be used as you say they are? Write a few sentences that make claims about where a person can see a folktale, for instance, "reinforcing family values." Only replace "reinforcing family values" with your own main argument

• Who is being affected by folktales, and how?

• What characteristics, aspects, smaller parts of the subject (for us, folktales) prove, or reinforce your argument? How do those characteristics do so?

Writing Activity 2: Layering/Building An Argumentative Paragraph

For this activity you will split into groups of 3-4 students and build one Body Paragraph together, using a strong topic sentence.

1. Provide the sub-topics topic sentence.
2. Provide another 2-3 sentences that expand on idea of that topic sentence. You want to lead in to your examples that help prove your point!
3. Transition into source material using transitional devices, such as "For instance,..." or "Take the case of...," and then go into your source material*
4. After doing step #3, which is further described below, try to wrap up the paragraph with some ending thoughts before setting up a new idea. In other words, you want to lead out of the use of source material and back into the idea you are arguing.

*In incorporating source material, I want you to include two examples within your Body Paragraph:

1. A quick summary of a common theme found in the three variations of Cinderella read by the class. Of course, you want it to connect to your topic sentence!
2. Also, provide an appropriate quote from one of the essays that is in Chapter 12, either Stith Thompson's, Bonnie Cullen's or Bruno Bettelheim's essay. Which author makes a statement that reinforces your argument in this paragraph?

• Make sure to use in-text citation rules: include author's name, possibly use the essay title if it adds relevance, and make sure to put page number of quote in parentheses at the end of sentence. Consult the appendix at the back of our textbook if you can't remember!

Homework:

- Have a finished draft of your Midterm Essay, typed and ready at 12pm. Do not come to class late, have your draft printed before. We will Workshop drafts Thursday. Include a Work Cited page with citation of articles and stories used. For help, consult OWL or Diana Hacker's website on MLA citation.

- Critical Thinking/Writing: Order your Sub-Topics in Order of Importance. What are your main Sub-Topics that develop your thesis? In what order did you order your points in the essay? Why is it important that you ordered them this way? --> Hand-write up a 3-4 sentence explanation of why you decided on the order you did. We will discuss this before Workshop!.

Homework for Tuesday, 2/9:

- I want you to write a Rough Draft of your Midterm’s Introduction, including a thesis statement. Underline/highlight your thesis statement. Include in your thesis:

o Define folktales in two to four sentences. Work in a quote from Stith Thompson’s article read in class.

§ Historical perspective?

§ Transformation of meaning

o Provide a thesis à Why do folktales exist; what are they used for; by whom?

o Introduce your Topics that will be your topic sentence

- Also, separately, have at least two Topic Sentences that you feel help develop your thesis statement. Keep “folktales” as the subject of sentence!

o Example ways to start:

§ “One of the values folktales teach …”

§ “How do folktales teach children to be ...?”

- Lastly, read Bruno Bettelheim’s “’Cinderella’: A Story of Sibling Rivalry and Oedipal Conflicts” (627-634).