greetings!

Hello! Welcome to my blog which contains my thoughts and musings on WP2201J: Prizes and Popular Culture :) Here's a little bit about myself...

I'm Stefanie (or Stef, for short), a Year 3 History student from NUS. You might be thinking, hey, she's reading History AND is from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, surely critical reading and writing is not alien to her. So why am I taking this writing module? Undoubtedly, I have to read and write a fair bit for my major as books and journal articles are my main sources of information. However, being thrust with written material from the onset, one takes for granted the steps taken to careful analysis and clarity in writing - skills which are essential in reading History. Like all skills, these too require practice and refinement. This module is therefore most useful and not to mention a nice breather from the usual content-heavy modules I am used to in FASS.

Personally, I really enjoy studying History and it has been one of my two loves since junior college, the other being art. History interests me because it is so alive! Contrary to our secondary school experience, it is certainly not a mere regurgitation of facts but rather, an exploration of the how humans made sense of their existence and interacted with each other. History is also presented in narratives, which is a product of the historian's negotiation between the past and the present.

Anyway, enough about history! As someone who used to follow the 'awards season' for film and television in my youth, it is interesting to study how the phenomenon of prizes takes place in the larger context of mass culture. When I was younger, my friends and I would root for our favourite actors and movies, then eagerly watch the ceremonies, waiting to see if our choices were affirmed. Sometimes, our interest for certain films were only piqued when it was nominated for an award or two. In retrospect, so much of our interest was shaped by the narrative of prizes which mould our cultural sensibilities and our understanding of what makes a good film. I admit, to some extent prizes do codify how I perceive a work, perhaps not through passing judgement on whether it was good or bad, but in encouraging me to actually take a close look at it. Prizes do act as a filter in sieving out the better books or movies to watch for me, although sometimes I disagree with their choices (today's discussion on Crash versus Brokeback Mountain as the more deserving winner of Best Picture come to mind). It is therefore most exciting and fun to explore prizes further in this module :)

So this ends my short greeting. Till the next post!