Unit2

1. Unit2

2. Cultural information Audiovisual supplement Watch the video and answer the following questions. Pre-reading Activities - Audiovisual supplement 1 1.What are they doing in this scene? They are celebrating Mickey’s birthday. 2. What does Mickey mean when he says “I do not deserve it”? He is implying the gift is so nice and trying to be polite.

3. Cultural information Audiovisual supplement Mickey Mouse Pre-reading Activities - Audiovisual supplement 2

4. Cultural information Audiovisual supplement Minnie: It’s coming. Shh ... Hide. Mickey: Hi, Minnie, how about a little … Minnie: You clown. All: Happy birthday! Oh, you pal! Mickey: Hey, thanks! Thanks! Minnie: Go pick the cake. Mickey! Ah! An electric organ! Mickey: For me? Oh, I don’t deserve it. Donald Duck: Deserve a lot! How about a little play, Mickey? Minnie: Oh, Mickey! All: [laugh] Video Script1

5. Cultural information Audiovisual supplement American popular culture is the attitudes and perspectives shared by the majority of the U.S. citizens, which expresses itself through a number of media, including movies, music, sports and cultural icons. Cultural information1

6. Cultural information Audiovisual supplement • Movies e.g. Hollywood, Broadway • Music e.g. hip-hop, Rap, jazz, blues, country, R&B • Sports e.g. NBA • Cultural icons e.g. Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny Cultural information2

7. Cultural information Audiovisual supplement Cultural information1 • American Brands: Coca-Cola, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Wal-Mart Stores, etc. • American movies’ ticket office in China: American movies Avatar and Alice in Wonderland ranked the first and the second in China’s ticket office list of 2010.

8. Structural analysis Rhetorical features 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 global “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. Structural analysis The text can be divided into the following three parts: (Paragraph 1): This is the introduction where the author advances his idea that American culture is dominant over the “global village”. Part I

9. Structural analysis Rhetorical features Part 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 recognized worldwide, while Paragraph 5 explains why it is so. Structural analysis (Paragraph 6): The author concludes his argument with a thought-provoking restatement of his point. Part III

10. Structural analysis Rhetorical features 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 contrast 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 are other examples like dispatch－collect, well known－rarely acknowledged, love－hate, antagonism－dependency, monocultures－cultural bilingualism. Read the text and find other structural and lexical manifestations of contrast. Rhetorical Features 1

11. Detailed reading UNDER THE SIGN OF MICKEY MOUSE & CO. Todd Gitlin 1 Everywhere, 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. We’re more accustomed to Marshall McLuhan’s global village. Those who resort to this metaphor casually often 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 McLuhan’s image reveals an indispensable half-truth. If there is a village, it speaks 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 reading1

12. Detailed reading 2 At the entrance to the champagne cellar of Piper-Heidsieck in Reims, in eastern 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 today’s royal houses, presidents or 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 popular by far than poor doomed Marie. Detailed reading2

13. Detailed reading 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-, 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 America’s top exports. In 1999, in fact, film, television, music, radio, advertising, print publishing, and computer software together 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 reading3

14. Detailed reading Hardly anyone is exempt from the force of 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 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 France’s highest honor in the arts on Elizabeth Taylor and Sylvester Stallone. The point is not hypocrisy pure and simple but something deeper, something obscured by a single-minded emphasis on American power: dependency. Detailed reading4

15. Detailed reading Detailed reading5 American popular culture is the nemesis that hundreds of millions － perhaps billions － of people love, and love to hate. The antagonism and the 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.

16. Detailed reading 4 How shall we understand the Hong Kong T-shirt that says “I Feel Coke”? Or the little Japanese girl 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 near 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 reading6-7

17. Detailed reading 5 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 general, 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”, thoughthere are American tags on their experience － low-cost links to status and fun. Detailed reading8

18. Detailed reading Everywhere, fun lovers, efficiency seekers, Americaphiles, and Americaphobes alike pass through the portals of Disney and the arches of McDonald’s wearing Levi’s jeans and Gap jackets. Mickey Mouse and 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. America’s bid for global 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 reading9

19. Detailed reading 6 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 is 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 are true even if multinational corporations claim so: there is demand. Detailed reading9

20. Detailed reading What unifies the nations into a “global village”? (Paragraph 1) Detailed reading2—Quesion1 It is the media flow that unifies the nations into a “global village”, as it defies national boundaries. When national boundaries are 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.

21. Detailed reading How do you understand “the symmetry of the exhibition”? (Paragraphs 2) Detailed reading5—Quesion2 “The symmetry of 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 the metaphorical sense.

22. Detailed reading What underlies French hypocrisy as shown in Paragraph 3? (Paragraphs 3) Detailed reading8—Quesion3 French 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 and 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.

23. Detailed reading Why does American culture become a kind of lingua franca? (Paragraphs 2—6) Detailed reading8—Quesion2-5 Part 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 America’s attempt to popularize their culture in the world for economic, ideological and other purposes. In short, American culture as a kind of lingua franca is the result of America’s striking “from inside the spectator as well as from outside.”

24. Detailed reading Detailed reading8– Activity Group discussions How do you understand the questions the author raised in Paragraph 4 ?

25. Detailed reading defy: v. offer effective resistance to sth. or sb. Detailed reading1– defy e.g. defy public opinion a political move that defies explanation The baby boy defied all the odds and survived. Translation: 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。 The door defied all attempts to open it. _________________________________________________

26. Detailed reading amazing: a. very surprising, esp. in a way that makes you feel pleasure or admiration Detailed reading1– amazing e.g. an amazing achievement/discovery/success/ performance It’s amazing how quickly people adapt. Derivation: amazingly ad. e.g. Amazingly, no one noticed. The meal was amazingly cheap.

27. Detailed reading torrent: n. a rushing, violent or abundant stream of anything Detailed reading1-- torrent e.g. The rain was coming down in torrents. a torrent of abuse/criticism/words Derivation: torrential a. e.g. torrential applause a torrential flow of words Translation: 没等散会，暴雨就倾泻而下。 Before the meeting could end, torrential rain began to pour. ___________________________________________________________________

28. Detailed reading accustomed: a. familiar with sth. and accepting is as normal or usual Detailed reading1-- accustomed Collocations: be/become/get accustomed to sth. / doing sth. e.g. My eyes slowly grew accustomed to the dark. She was a person accustomed to having eight hours’ sleep a night. Synonyms: habituated, adapted Antonym: unaccustomed

29. Detailed reading resort: v. turn to sth. for assistance or as the means to an end Detailed reading1-- resort Collocation: resort to sth. e.g. They felt obliged to resort to violence. We may have to resort to using untrained staff.

30. Detailed reading dispatch: v. send off oraway with promptness or speed Detailed reading1-- dispatch e.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. Phrase: with dispatch: quickly and efficiently (dispatch as a noun) e.g. He carries out his duties with dispatch.

31. Detailed reading indispensable: a. essential; too important to be without Detailed reading2-- indispensable e.g. Cars have become an indispensable part of our lives. Collocations: indispensable to sb. / sth. indispensable for sth. / doing sth. e.g. She made herself indispensable to the department. e.g. A good dictionary is indispensable for learning a foreign language. Antonym: dispensable e.g. They looked on music and art lessons as dispensable.

32. Detailed reading swoosh: v. make a brushing sound Detailed reading2– swoosh e.g. Cars and trucks swooshed past. The basketball swooshed through the net. Translation: 飞机的推进器卷起一阵呼啸的强风。 The propellers of the plane swooshed a gale. _________________________________________________

33. Detailed reading narrate: v. give a continuous account of sth. Detailed reading2–narrate e.g. She entertained them by narrating her adventures in Africa. Derivations: narration: n. e.g. The richness of his novel comes from his narration of it. narrative: a. e.g. narrative fiction/ structure narrator: n. e.g. So he listens and waits for the narrator to explain more.

34. Detailed reading celebrity: n. A celebrity is someone who has become famous for sth., esp. for sth. connected with acting or show business. Detailed reading3–celebrity a global/local celebrity TV celebrities e.g. Translation: 这场讲座由一位体育名人主讲。 The lecture will be given by a sports celebrity. ____________________________________________________ 他是小镇上最出名的人物。 He is the most well-known celebrity in the town. ______________________________________________________

35. Detailed reading distribute: v. pass out or deliver Detailed reading3– distribute Collocation: distribute sth. (to/among sb./sth.) e.g. The organization distributed food and blankets to the earthquake victims. The money was distributed among schools in the area. Translation: 本报免费发送。 The newspaper is distributed free. ____________________________________________________ 这些传单将由数百名中学生散发。 The leaflets were to be distributed by hundreds of high school students. _______________________________________________________________________________

36. Detailed reading Derivation: Detailed reading3– distribute2 distribution:n. e.g. the unfair distribution of wealth They studied the geographical distribution of the disease.

37. Detailed reading exempt: a. not subject to an obligation, liability, etc. Detailed reading3– exempt Collocation: exempt from sth. e.g. The interest on the money is exempt from tax. Some students are exempt from certain exams. Word formation: -exempt: in compounds, forming adjectives e.g. tax-exempt donations to charity

38. Detailed reading resentment: n. a feeling of displeasure or indignation at sb. or sth. regarded as the cause of injury or insult Detailed reading4– resentment e.g. She could not conceal the deep resentment she felt at the way she had been treated. They had to suppress all their natural resentments. Collocations: feel/harbour/bear resentment towards/against sb. Synonyms: hatred, hostility, enmity, malice

39. Detailed reading notoriety: n. fame for being bad in some way Detailed reading4– notoriety notoriety for/as sth. Collocations: e.g. She achieved notoriety for her affair with the senator. He gained a certain notoriety as a gambler. Derivation: notorious: a. e.g. a notorious criminal The country is notorious for its appalling prison conditions. Synonyms: infamy, discredit

40. Detailed reading confer: v. give sb. an award, a university degree or a particular honour or right Detailed reading5– confer confer sth. on/upon sb. Collocation: e.g. An honorary degree was conferred on him by Oxford University in 1995. The Queen conferred knighthood on the brave soldier. Synonyms: bestow, grant, award, honour

41. Detailed reading nemesis: n. (pl. nemeses) an unconquerable opponent or rival Detailed reading5– nemesis e.g. Injury, consistently his nemesis, struck him down during the match. The basketball team met its nemesis. Every civilization seems to have its nemesis. Etymology: The word originates from Greek Mythology. Nemesis is a goddess who is usually portrayed as the agent of divine punishment for wrongdoing or presumption.

42. Detailed reading indigenous: a. characteristic of a particular region or country Detailed reading6– indigenous countries with rich indigenous cultural traditionsThe elephant is indigenous to India. e.g. Translation: 大熊猫产于中国。 Giant pandas are indigenous to China. ____________________________________________________ 袋鼠原产于澳大利亚。 The kangaroo is indigenous to Australia. ____________________________________________________ Synonyms: native, aboriginal, local

43. Detailed reading reverse: v. bring back to or into; turn in the opposite direction Detailed reading7– reverse e.g. The government has failed to reverse the economic decline. He took the chair, reversed it, and drew it towards the fire. in reverse: in the opposite order or way; backwards Phrases: e.g. The password is my phone number in reverse. go/put sth. into reverse: start to happen or to make sth. happen in the opposite way e.g. In the 1980s, the economic growth went into reverse.

44. Detailed reading monocular: a. having only one eye Detailed reading6-7– monocular He had only monocular vision. a monocular microscope e.g. monocularity: n. monocularly: ad. Derivations:

45. Detailed reading cosmopolitan: a. belonging to all the world Detailed reading6-7– cosmopolitan e.g. I was very much struck by London － the fact that it’s so cosmopolitan. a cosmopolitan city/resort Translation: 音乐是最具有世界性的艺术之一。 Music is one of the most cosmopolitan of the arts. _______________________________________________________ 这个俱乐部具有国际氛围。 The club has a cosmopolitan atmosphere. _______________________________________________

46. Detailed reading Detailed reading8– portal portal: a. (formal or literary) a door, gate or entrance, esp. one of imposing size and appearance e.g. the main portal of the cathedral villas with huge marble portals the portal of knowledge

47. Detailed reading icon: n. symbol Detailed reading8– icon Click on the printer icon with the mouse. a feminist icon Madonna and other pop icons of the 1980s e.g. Synonym: idol, symbol, model

48. Detailed reading omnipresent: a. present everywhere at the same time Detailed reading8– omnipresent e.g. These days the media are omnipresent. the omnipresent threat of natural disasters Word formation: omni-: all omnipotent, omniscient, omnivorous e.g.

49. Detailed reading Detailed reading1– Paragraph 1 Everywhere, the media flow defies national boundaries. (Paragraph 1) Paraphrase: Throughout the world, the modern electronic media flow across national boundaries. / Throughout the world, the media flow is not barred by national boundaries.

50. Detailed reading Just as their “cultures” are neither hard-wired nor uniform, so there is no simple way in which they are “Americanized”, though there are American tags on their experience － low-cost links to status and fun. (Paragraph 5) Detailed reading1– Paragraph 5 Paraphrase: For young people, cultures are not innate or unvarying. They don’t simply become Americanized although they may have contact with American fun culture at little cost.