Jodie Foster's Golden Globes Speech

There is some controversy over Jodie Foster's Golden Globes speech, through which she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award and made some impassioned comments about privacy. Watch the video. Respond with a blog post in which you attempt to answer questions about the rhetorical situation that Foster's speech seems to want to draw from as a springboard for ... for what? Ask:

1. What do I know about Jodie Foster?
2. Who was Cecil B. DeMille? What is this award intended to "mean"? (why is it given? does it have alternative "real" implications? what are they?)
3. Who is Jodie Foster? Have I seen her work? 
4. What is her "public significance" in terms of popular media?
5. In what sorts of public rhetorics is Jodie Foster invoked? (search this; don't simply rely on memory).
6. What was her goal? What did she want her speech to do to/for you? What did she want you to think? to do? (or not think ... not do ... start doing, etc.)
7. Was she clear? If not, why? Did it matter? How? 
8. Did you discern any subtextual discourses that may help us to understand her purpose(s)?
9. Who was the audience? Of course, she was speaking, immediately, to the GG audience of her celebrity friends, but she was also speaking to hundreds of thousands of television and streaming web viewers, as well. How do you imagine Foster crafting this speech for *just that person(s)*?
10. Was this an appropriate or effective venue for this speech? Why? Why not?
11. Did you like it? Why? Why not?

video via Rolling Stone. 

Hello, and welcome to Public Rhetorics and Popular Media (PRPM). In this course, we will work through a common, useful language that is capable of helping us develop strategies for understanding PRPM. Such knowledge may help us to be(come) increasingly critical consumers and producers of cultural texts. For, as Dick Hebdige argues in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, "Violation of the authorized codes through which the social world is organized and experienced have considerable power to provoke and disturb" (587), and it is through provocation and disturbance that we nudge, shift, change, or simply come to comprehend and navigate those codes ... through rhetorical action.

To Do: Order the book Rhetoric and Popular Culture. 3rd ed. by Barry Brummett. You can find it on Amazon (or elsewhere). Get it right away. I can always make copies of the first chapter, in case your order isn't in by Tuesday (when I will assign light reading), so don't worry it too much, but do order the book a.s.a.p. Thanks!

In our Canvas space, I am including an outline of the course under the heading "Syllabus." The storyboard you see there will evolve to include "the legal" between now and Thursday of Week One.

Finally, I use Canvas mostly to send announcements to the class. I will also be developing this course blog, where I will house the assignments and pdfs and major links. I prefer to host my course via my Blogger blogs; ease of use and a few lovelier design options guide my thinking. I hope you don't mind one or two extra clicks. I will also ask you to build a Blogger blog (which we'll link to the course blog). I will assign reflective blog posts; you  you may also generally use your blog posts as spaces for reflecting upon those PRPM matters that concern you most (this can be useful invention for our projects).

Works Cited

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Excerpt in Cultual Studies: An Anthology. Ed. Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. 587-598.