Wednesday, August 29, 2007

TALK AMONGST YOURSELVES. I'LL GIVE YOU A TOPIC. POPULAR CULTURE IS NEITHER POPULAR NOR CULTURE. DISCUSS: So now that you have your course books for Popular Culture in the United States, let's spend some time thinking very broadly about how we might study the history of American pop culture.

To overgeneralize egregriously, there are two main camps among pop-culture historians. On one side are those led by the late Lawrence Levine, who argued that popular culture is "the folklore of industrial society" -- it's of, by, and for the people. In this view, consumers exert substantial influence over the production, distribution, and reception of popular culture, making choices freely and enthusiastically, sometimes even subverting the interpretive intentions of the "culture industries" in New York and Hollywood. Levine's approach is best captured in his collection of essays, The Unpredictable Past.

To other scholars, however, this picture of popular culture is way too rosy. Historians like the wonderfully named T.J. Jackson Lears--yes, he's named for that T.J. Jackson--insist that consumers' "agency" is feeble at best, and that most of their supposed "choices" are actually made within parameters totally controlled by pop-culture producers. Lears lays out a much more nuanced version of this argument in his history of American advertising, Fables of Abundance.

Again, this is all way too overstated, and there are, of course, plenty of scholars who fall somewhere between Levine and Lears. But this debate highlights some key questions about the nature of popular culture. Does culture merely reflect society, or does it actually shape society? Is popular culture a "mirror" or a "maker"? And these questions in turn make us think more critically about our own pop-culture tastes. Why, exactly, do we like particular pop-culture products? Are our tastes truly independent, or are they influenced by other factors, from family to friends to advertisements?

My first writing assignment asks students to examine these questions by writing a "pop-culture autobiography" -- a 5-6 page paper that offers some critical reflections on their evolving pop-culture tastes, blending personal anecdotes and academic analysis. These papers are always fun to read, especially when a student has one dramatically pivotal pop-culture moment in his or her life: "But then I heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' and my life changed forever...." I highly recommend writing your own pop-culture autobiography. It's an often humbling experience -- particularly if you have to cop to some embarrassing childhood favorites -- but it also helps you see how you've become the consumer you are today.

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