Ivory Tower

Bunmi singles out a new faux-academic paper on the source of Superman's powers (based, hilariously enough, on the website for Dinosaur Comics), which got me thinking.  I've always been curious about institutional academic inquiry into pop culture, like the folks who do Buffy studies, which seems both like something of a dream job, and something that I wonder how folks justify to committees, and funders (recognizing, of course, that I'm a pop culture blogger, not, you know, a political philosopher, or anything similarly Big and Serious myself).  I think, and I've said before, that media studies and pop culture are important and leading indicators about what our society values, and that inquiry into them should be taken seriously rather than belittled.  Writing about Superman's powers, or gender in Buffy isn't less useful to society than studying some truly obscure political science, or ancient, minor literature, and might actually be more.  But because it's current, rather than validated by time and the accumulation of other, lesser cultural achievements, I think there's a tendency to regard serious inquiry into pop culture as a slightly absurd pursuit, rather than as a partial and fragmented Rosetta Stone to who we are.