Pop Goes the Culture!

When we lived in New York, I often took my daughter to the Museum of Television and Radio. There, I showed her videos of cartoons I used to watch on Saturday mornings when I was her age. They even had the old commercials for Trix cereal and Ovaltine. We had a blast watching reruns of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman, and Dudley Dooright. My point in doing this wasn’t just for entertainment, but to share with her some of the artifacts from my youth.

Despite my somewhat romanticized notions about television from the ‘60s, I must admit to a certain disappointment in reading this week’s chapter on “Cultural Studies and Composition.” I felt somewhat short-changed. Pop culture, expressed through mass media, does little to demonstrate who I really am, where I come from, what my beliefs are. All it does, in fact, is tell me why I turned out to have such a ridiculous sense of humor.

This chapter leaves me doing a mental inventory of my personal deficiencies held in the light of modern culture. For example, why do I find this suggestion, quoted by Joseph Harris, to be so repugnant?: “(Ask) students to look at the way they use popular texts in forming their own identities.” Perhaps it comes from a vision of a classroom containing so diverse a population of students that what is considered “pop” to one student is foreign to another. In an effort to fit in, would some students resort to some contrived response?

I was relieved to finally read beyond this point of “the popularity of the popular” as the authors picked up steam and addressed the work of Maxine Hairston. She argues that multicultural responsibility is achieved by enabling students to reflect on their personal (and varied) experiences through their writing. This, of course, takes the pressure off of students to try to wrap their heads around “popular” works, which someone other than them has presumed to be culturally significant. A fine line exists between acknowledging the omnipresence of pop culture and insulting students by infusing it into the classroom in a manner presumed to resonate for each and every one of them. The importance of a cultural icon, like a vernacular or symbol, is in the eye of the beholder.

I like Hairston’s approach because she celebrates what’s going on in the classroom and who occupies its desks. She doesn’t start out by asking how a student feels about a cultural artifact; she starts out asking for a student to share a real experience, “so that students ‘can understand the rich tapestry of cultures that their individual stories make up.’” [(191) 85]. We won't do any harm by suggesting there might be a place for components of pop culture in one’s writing. But through the ethnography, a culturally sound composition class allows students to define for themselves what is meaningful for them.