You’ve Got to Be Taught” -A Primary Source Analysis

Project instructions:
Instructions from professor:

For this paper, you will interpret the show tune, “You’ve Got to Be Taught” from the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. The purpose of the exercise is to focus intensely on the nature of a source, avoiding a superficial analysis. I want you to make a sustained argument and support it with evidence from a close examination of the song.

Successful arguments about primary sources begin with careful attention to the thematic and formal features of the text as well as the conditions of its production. In arriving at an argument, you should first concentrate on figuring out all of the details of the source. For written texts, this includes giving consideration to diction, syntax, grammar, and sentence structure; voice, tone, style, and genre; images, metaphors, and themes; and structure. (For visual or musical texts, you will want to consider parallel elements of their construction.) You will also want to think outside of the text, to consider the creator’s relationship to the audience of the song and the links between this song and other works/events of the time. Your examination should also focus on the context of the song in relation to history, politics, the social climate of the time, overall message, and effect.

The key to writing an interesting analysis of a primary source is to find something that intrigues you about it and try to figure out what that something means.

In writing your paper, you should take care to situate your reader with respect to your source and its context, providing any and all pertinent information that he/she needs to know inorder to properly understand its meaning. This might include: the creator’s name and background; the context of creation; the genre of the source; and the reason for its creation (insofar as it is possible to know from the source). Your aim should be that any educated non-specialist, even one who does not know anything specific about your source or its topic, can follow your argument.