Wang

In her article about Forrest Gump, Wang cites political speeches that ascribe tremendous power to individual texts such as Murphy Brown and Forrest Gump. These statements assume that these texts are themselves capable of having monumental effects on society such as causing the riots of South Central Los Angeles and the disintegration of the nuclear family.

Do you agree with the speakers of these statements about the degree of power they attributed to individual texts?

How do Dan Quayle's disparaging statements about autonomous women and his Republican Party's then plan to reestablish the male patriarch in the nuclear family relate to Marx's ideas about the dominant structure of society and how it functions?

Wang makes some serious assumptions about what the producers of the movie Forrest Gump were trying to say about the validity of various political and social movements of the 1960's. Do you think that Wang is correct in her identification of their true agenda?