| Projects
These are some sample projects. Please feel free to make up one of your own, but check it out with the instructor before starting in on it . Maximum length for projects = 2 pages. Project #1: Find a picture involving an animal or animals in a magazine, newspaper, brochure, or book, or record one from radio or television advertising, wild-life program, talk show, etc. (max 5 minutes of tape). Look at the image and ead or listen to any accompanying text (transcribe if on TV or radio). How are themes of innately based behavioral mechanisms, or of observational/reinforced learning (Bandura) manifest or refuted in this representation. Project #2: Record some dreams, starting as early as you can in the course. Try to indentify overtly aggressive thems (the man struck his father with the large stick). Then try to indentify disguised or muted aggression -- as in any symbolic negation (the gold watch disappeared from view) or transformation (I swallowed the whole thing), or leaving someone or something (I turned away from her to see the sunrise). Try to link your intepretatoin of such themes to something in the psychological readings we have been doing. Watching the dream scene from Hitchcock's Spellbound may help. Project #3: Try to indentify briefly an example or examples of the following in the JFa material (session #6):
Indicate the passage(s) you mean in each case, and then add a sentence
after each explaining why you interpret the passage in term sof that particular
Freudian concept. Project #5: Identify some area of "cultural fantasy", such as video games, comic books, TV sitcoms, or political cartoons in the NYT Sunday section. Collect, observe, record and bring to class a brief (one page, max.) summary of what you have found. Try to focus on one specific aspect that involves both gender and aggression (e.g. aggressive lavatory humour in boys comic books; slapstick sequences between homosocial men in American silent movies). Relate to course readings.
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