Following up on
yesterday's post about pop culture and the academy, there's a really fascinating (to me, anyway) conversation going on in the comments between folks who have
actual experience doing academic work on pop culture. On the question of whether it's a schlepp to get departments to approve work on the subject, SEK, who's taught culture classes, writes:
The idea--that is, what I had to sell my course-runner on--is to study the mechanics of mediums that students actively seek out. It doesn't make much sense to teach students who don't read novels how to understand the rhetoric of novelistic prose.
But Leee says that doing thesis work on a piece of pop you love can break it for you:
During my thesis-writing struggles, my advisor said something like, "It must have some intellectual heft in order to interest you." And I realized silently, "Uh, not really, I just really like Alias and wanted to write something on it." I got a decent argument out of the thesis, but since then, I've heard/read papers that are overly fawning and hagiographic wastes of time. The heavy-lifting involved in the thesis killed my enthusiasm for the show, which is another caveat -- don't poop where you eat, be careful what you wish for, etc.
And GayAsXmas says that the demands of the academic form can slant the interpretation you end up selling:
In an effort to try and head off criticisms from my thesis supervisor I took a position on the show that I didn't entirely believe and wrote a large part of my thesis being somewhat critical of the show's gender dynamics. I don't believe I actually crossed a line whereby anything I wrote was intellectually indefensable but I did believe that contrariness was the best way to get away with the subject matter.
Finally, scottstev points to an argument that the academy might want to choose other priorities:
I would like to add that that Althouse makes a decent point that perhaps the academy should investigate things that aren't ubiquitous like pop culture. There's plenty of liquid crystals being burned studying contemporary culture, let the university pore over the obscure and forgotten.
I don't find myself coming down on one end or the other of this argument just yet, but I'm intrigued by the stories of those of you who have actually done it--and you're posting insightful things on that thread faster than I can exerpt them. Thank you for sharing. And the rest of you, go check it out.