1、Unit2Unit14UndertheSignofMickeyMouse&Co.Watch the video and answer the following questions.1.What are they doing in this scene?Pre-reading Activities-Audiovisual supplement 1Audiovisual supplementCultural informationThey are celebrating Mickeys birthday.He is implying the gift is so nice and trying
2、to be polite.2.What does Mickey mean when he says“I do not deserve it”?Pre-reading Activities-Audiovisual supplement 2Audiovisual supplementCultural informationMickey Mouse Minnie:Its coming.Shh.Hide.Mickey:Hi,Minnie,how about a little Minnie:You clown.All:Happy birthday!Oh,you pal!Mickey:Hey,thanks
3、!Thanks!Minnie:Go pick the cake.Mickey!Ah!An electric organ!Mickey:For me?Oh,I dont deserve it.Donald Duck:Deserve a lot!How about a little play,Mickey?Minnie:Oh,Mickey!All:laughVideo Script1Audiovisual supplementCultural informationAmerican popular culture is the attitudes and perspectives shared b
4、y the majority of the U.S.citizens,which expresses itself through a number of media,including movies,music,sports and cultural icons.Cultural information 1Audiovisual supplementCultural informationl Movies e.g.Hollywood,Broadwayl Music e.g.hip-hop,Rap,jazz,blues,country,R&Bl Sports e.g.NBAl Cultural
5、 icons e.g.Mickey Mouse,Bugs Bunny Cultural information 2Audiovisual supplementCultural informationl American Brands:Coca-Cola,IBM,Johnson&Johnson,Microsoft,Wal-Mart Stores,etc.l American movies ticket office in China:American movies Avatar and Alice in Wonderland ranked the first and the second in
6、Chinas ticket office list of 2010.Cultural information 1Audiovisual supplementCultural informationStructural analysis American culture has been infiltrating nations all over the world over the past two decades,marginalizing traditional cultures throughout the world and bringing about the kind of glo
7、bal“fun”culture that Disney is famous for.In this text,Todd Gitlin reveals the trend that American culture is becoming dominant and enjoys worldwide popularity,and accounts for this cultural phenomenon.Rhetorical featuresStructural analysisThe text can be divided into the following three parts:Part
8、I(Paragraph 1):This is the introduction where the author advances his idea that American culture is dominant over the“global village”.Structural analysisRhetorical featuresStructural analysisPart III(Paragraph 6):The author concludes his argument with a thought-provoking restatement of his point.Par
9、t II(Paragraphs 2 5):This part presents evidence of the universal popularity that American culture enjoys,and explores what underlies the cultural phenomenon.This part can be further divided into two sub-sections.Paragraphs 2 4 as a sub-section give testimony to the idea that American pop culture is
10、 recognized worldwide,while Paragraph 5 explains why it is so.Rhetorical Features 1Rhetorical featuresStructural analysis Contrast is a prominent feature of the text.It is realized by parallel structures,where there is semantic disparity.For instance,in Paragraph 1,“in mansions on the hill”is in con
11、trast to“in huts”.In Paragraph 4,Grandfather is dressed in“traditional Tungusian clothing”.Grandson has on his head“a reversed baseball cap”.Contrast is also manifested through lexical opposition,as exemplified in“They are both local and cosmopolitan”,where“local”is opposite to“cosmopolitan”.There a
12、re other examples like dispatchcollect,well knownrarely acknowledged,lovehate,antagonismdependency,monoculturescultural bilingualism.Read the text and find other structural and lexical manifestations of contrast.Detailed reading1Detailed readingUNDER THE SIGN OF MICKEY MOUSE&CO.Todd Gitlin 1 Everywh
13、ere,the media flow defies national boundaries.This is one of its obvious,but at the same time amazing,features.A global torrent is not,of course,the master metaphor to which we have grown accustomed.Were more accustomed to Marshall McLuhans global village.Those who resort to this metaphor casually o
14、ften forget that if the world is a global village,some live in mansions on the hill,others in huts.Some dispatch images and sounds around town at the touch of a button;others collect them at the touch of their buttons.Yet McLuhans image reveals an indispensable half-truth.If there is a village,it sp
15、eaks American.It wears jeans,drinks Coke,eats at the golden arches,walks on swooshed shoes,plays electric guitars,recognizes Mickey Mouse,James Dean,E.T.,Bart Simpson,R2-D2,and Pamela Anderson.Detailed reading2Detailed reading2 At the entrance to the champagne cellar of Piper-Heidsieck in Reims,in e
16、astern France,a plaque declares that the cellar was dedicated by Marie Antoinette.The tour is narrated in six languages,and at the end you walk back upstairs into a museum featuring photographs of famous people drinking champagne.And who are they?Perhaps members of todays royal houses,presidents or
17、prime ministers,economic titans or Nobel Prize winners?Of course not.They are movie stars,almost all of them American Marilyn Monroe to Clint Eastwood.The symmetry of the exhibition is obvious,the premise unmistakable:Hollywood stars,champions of consumption,are the royalty of this century,more popu
18、lar by far than poor doomed Marie.3 Hollywood is the global cultural capital capital in both senses.The United States presides over a sort of World Bank of styles and symbols,an International Cultural Fund of images,sounds,and celebrities.The goods may be distributed by American-,Canadian-,European-
19、,Japanese-,or Australian-owned multinational corporations,but their styles,themes,and images do not detectably change when a new board of directors takes over.Entertainment is one of Americas top exports.In 1999,in fact,film,television,music,radio,advertising,print publishing,and computer software t
20、ogether were the top export,almost$80 billion worth,and while software alone accounted for$50 billion of the total,some of that category also qualifies as entertainment video games and pornography,for example.Detailed reading3Detailed readingDetailed reading4 Hardly anyone is exempt from the force o
21、f American images and sounds.French resentment of Mickey Mouse,Bruce Willis,and the reset of American civilization is well known.Less well known,and rarely acknowledged by the French,is the fact that Terminator 2 sold 5 million tickets in France during the month it opened with no submachine guns at
22、the heads of the customers.The same culture minister,Jack Lang,who in 1982 achieved a moment of predictable notoriety in the United States for declaring that Dallas amounted to cultural imperialism,also conferred Frances highest honor in the arts on Elizabeth Taylor and Sylvester Stallone.The point
23、is not hypocrisy pure and simple but something deeper,something obscured by a single-minded emphasis on American power:dependency.Detailed readingDetailed reading5 American popular culture is the nemesis that hundreds of millions perhaps billions of people love,and love to hate.The antagonism and th
24、e dependency are inseparable,for the media flood essentially American in its origin,but virtually unlimited in its reach represents,like it or not,a common imagination.Detailed readingDetailed reading6-74 How shall we understand the Hong Kong T-shirt that says“I Feel Coke”?Or the little Japanese gir
25、l who asks an American visitor in all innocence,“Is there really a Disneyland in America?”(She knows the one in Tokyo.)Or the experience of a German television reporter sent to Siberia to film indigenous life,who after flying out of Moscow and then travelling for days by boat,bus,and jeep,arrives ne
26、ar the Arctic Sea where live a tribe of Tungusians known to ethnologists for their bearskin rituals.In the community store sits a grandfather with his grandchild on his knee.Grandfather is dressed in traditional Tungusian clothing.Grandson has on his head a reversed baseball cap.Detailed readingDeta
27、iled reading85 American popular culture is the closest approximation today to a global lingua franca,drawing the urban and young in particular into a common cultural zone where they share some dreams of freedom,wealth,comfort,innocence,and power and perhaps most of all,youth as a state of mind.In ge
28、neral,despite the rhetoric of“identity,”young people do not live in monocultures.They are not monocular.They are both local and cosmopolitan.Cultural bilingualism is routine.Just as their“cultures”are neither hard-wired nor uniform,so there is no simple way in which they are“Americanized”,though the
29、re are American tags on their experience low-cost links to status and fun.Detailed readingDetailed reading9Everywhere,fun lovers,efficiency seekers,Americaphiles,and Americaphobes alike pass through the portals of Disney and the arches of McDonalds wearing Levis jeans and Gap jackets.Mickey Mouse an
30、d Donald Duck,John Wayne,Marilyn Monroe,James Dean,Bob Dylan,Michael Jackson,Madonna,Clint Eastwood,Bruce Willis,the multi-color chorus of Coca-Cola,and the next flavor of the month or the universe are the icons of a curious sort of one-world sensibility,a global semiculture.Americas bid for global
31、unification surpasses in reach that of the Roman,the British,the Catholic or Islam;though without either an army or a God,it requires less.The Tungusian boy with the reversed cap on his head does not automatically think of it as“American,”let alone side with the U.S.Army.Detailed readingDetailed rea
32、ding96 The misleadingly easy answer to the question of how American images and sounds became omnipresent is:American imperialism.But the images are not even faintly force-led by American corporate,political,or military power.The empire strikes from inside the spectator as well as from outside.This i
33、s a conundrum that deserves to be approached with respect if we are to grasp the fact that Mickey Mouse and Coke are everywhere recognized and often enough enjoyed.In the peculiar unification at work throughout the world,there is surely a supply side,but there is not only a supply side.Some things a
34、re true even if multinational corporations claim so:there is demand.Detailed readingWhat unifies the nations into a“global village”?(Paragraph 1)Detailed reading2Quesion1It is the media flow that unifies the nations into a“global village”,as it defies national boundaries.When national boundaries are
35、 no longer a barrier of communication and when communication is so easy and fast on the Internet,people all over the world feel as if they were living in the same one village.Detailed readingHow do you understand“the symmetry of the exhibition”?(Paragraphs 2)Detailed reading5Quesion2“The symmetry of
36、 the exhibition”means the balance,or the approximate balance between two sides:on the one hand is Marie Antoinette,the dedicator of the cellar and Queen of France to Louis XVI,and on the other are American pop stars.The former was royalty in history while the latter are royalty of the modern era,in
37、the metaphorical sense.Detailed readingWhat underlies French hypocrisy as shown in Paragraph 3?(Paragraphs 3)Detailed reading8Quesion3French hypocrisy as manifested by the two facts related in Paragraph 3 is only superficial.There is something deeper.What lies behind is the paradox:the antagonism an
38、d the dependency are inseparable.People everywhere consciously resist the invasion of American culture for the maintenance of their native cultures,but subconsciously enjoy and even rely on American culture.Detailed readingWhy does American culture become a kind of lingua franca?(Paragraphs 26)Detai
39、led reading8Quesion2-5Part of the reason that American culture becomes a kind of lingua franca,i.e.it is universally recognized,is that it meets a psychological need in the growth of the young.Another part of the reason is Americas attempt to popularize their culture in the world for economic,ideolo
40、gical and other purposes.In short,American culture as a kind of lingua franca is the result of Americas striking“from inside the spectator as well as from outside.”Detailed readingDetailed reading8 ActivityGroup discussionsHow do you understand the questions the author raised in Paragraph 4?Detailed
41、 readingdefy:v.offer effective resistance to sth.or sb.Detailed reading1 defye.g.defy public opiniona political move that defies explanationThe baby boy defied all the odds and survived.Detailed readingTranslation:他不顾一切困难坚持干下去。他不顾一切困难坚持干下去。He was going ahead defying all difficulties._这扇门怎么样都打不开。这扇门怎
42、么样都打不开。The door defied all attempts to open it._amazing:a.very surprising,esp.in a way that makes you feel pleasure or admiration Detailed reading1 amazingDetailed readinge.g.an amazing achievement/discovery/success/performanceIts amazing how quickly people adapt.e.g.Amazingly,no one noticed.The mea
43、l was amazingly cheap.Derivation:amazingly ad.Detailed reading1-torrenttorrent:n.a rushing,violent or abundant stream of anythinge.g.The rain was coming down in torrents.a torrent of abuse/criticism/wordsDetailed readinge.g.torrential applausea torrential flow of wordsDerivation:torrential a.Transla
44、tion:没等散会,暴雨就倾泻而下。没等散会,暴雨就倾泻而下。Before the meeting could end,torrential rain began to pour._Detailed reading1-accustomedaccustomed:a.familiar with sth.and accepting is as normal or usual Detailed readinge.g.My eyes slowly grew accustomed to the dark.She was a person accustomed to having eight hours s
45、leep a night.Synonyms:habituated,adapted Collocations:be/become/get accustomed to sth./doing sth.Antonym:unaccustomed Detailed reading1-resortresort:v.turn to sth.for assistance or as the means to an endDetailed readinge.g.They felt obliged to resort to violence.We may have to resort to using untrai
46、ned staff.Collocation:resort to sth.Detailed reading1-dispatchdispatch:v.send off or away with promptness or speedDetailed readinge.g.The government was preparing to dispatch 6,000 soldiers to search the island.The victory inspired him to dispatch a gleeful telegram to the President.e.g.He carries o
47、ut his duties with dispatch.Phrase:with dispatch:quickly and efficiently(dispatch as a noun)Detailed reading2-indispensableindispensable:a.essential;too important to be without e.g.Cars have become an indispensable part of our lives.Detailed readinge.g.She made herself indispensable to the departmen
48、t.Collocations:indispensable to sb./sth.indispensable for sth./doing sth.e.g.A good dictionary is indispensable for learning a foreign language.e.g.They looked on music and art lessons as dispensable.Antonym:dispensable swoosh:v.make a brushing soundDetailed reading2 swooshe.g.Cars and trucks swoosh
49、ed past.The basketball swooshed through the net.Detailed readingTranslation:飞机的推进器卷起一阵呼啸的强风。飞机的推进器卷起一阵呼啸的强风。The propellers of the plane swooshed a gale._Detailed reading2narrateDetailed readingnarrate:v.give a continuous account of sth.e.g.She entertained them by narrating her adventures in Africa.e
50、.g.The richness of his novel comes from his narration of it.Derivations:narration:n.e.g.narrative fiction/structurenarrative:a.e.g.So he listens and waits for the narrator to explain more.narrator:n.Detailed reading3celebrity a global/local celebrityTV celebritiese.g.Detailed readingcelebrity:n.A ce