Cultural References

Improved Essays
The historical and cultural references in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's "The Culture Industry" and Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" are subtle but nonetheless fundamental. I began the research process by perusing through both writings to find references applicable to my papers. That is, I tried to find references that substantiated and bolstered the points I made in Midterm Paper 1. I found eight references that were suitable for further investigation: Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Nicholas Malebranche, the Hays office, Donald Duck, Charlie Chaplin (especially A Woman of Paris), Franz Werfel, surrealism, and Mickey Mouse. After some thought and deliberation, I decided that Donald …show more content…
On Oskicat and A-Z Databases (via the Berkeley Library page), I immediately found it difficult to identify useful databases from less useful ones. The Berkeley A-Z Database page has over 1200 databases, and I was overwhelmed as where to start. I eventually began by looking through the lists of databases by category: Film Studies, German Studies, History, Literature, and Philosophy. Isolating the databases by field of study and description helped me narrow the number of databases I was looking at to ten or so. I also found it extremely difficult to find accessible whole articles on the many databases I accessed. There were only a few databases of interest that provided full articles: JStor, Proquest, and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Every article I listed in the bibliography was from one of these websites (certainly a limitation of my research). On JStor and Proquest, I also found it difficult to narrow my searches down; with initial search terms such as "Donald Duck" and "surrealism," my searches were yielding thousands of results. I overcame this challenge by using advanced searches (e.g. "Donald Duck" and "Symbolism," articles and English only, peer-review). Even with advanced searches, though, it was challenging to find five or so decent articles pertaining to the arguments I made in Midterm Paper

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