Raymond Williams, academic and critic, famously declared that culture is one of ‘the two or three most complicated words in the English language’. The dictionary meaning of popular culture is ‘books, music, art, enjoyed by most people’. Popular culture encompasses not just one, but perspectives from several academic disciplines: literature, film studies, music, media/new media, visual culture, anthropology, sociology and fashion theory.
Consequently, while teaching the course ‘Introduction to Popular Culture’ to students of humanities as well as engineering sciences at IIT-M, it was important to remember that no topic was beyond the scope of the course, from carnival to camp; pulp fiction to pastiche; semiotics to skateboarding; inter-textuality to hip-hop; or vampire in popular imagination to globalisation. There was an enthusiastic response to the course. Students particularly liked the way in which the course integrated diverse topics that included Mountain Dew’s marketing slogan ‘Do the Dew’, street graphics, switching languages in popular magazines, Adorno’s theory of popular music, Andy Warhol’s concept of ‘15 minutes of fame’ and David Hockney’s prints.
What they sayJayadev Bhaskaran, Department of Electrical Engineering, said, “I enjoyed the fact that we had a lot of interesting discussions based on the topics.” Shilpa Menon from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences felt, “I learnt not to look down upon all that is popular and brand it lowbrow and mindless. Placed in the right context and explained by the right theories, a study of pop culture becomes just as exalted as the study of classical poetry.” Similarly, C. Eshwar from the Department of Computer Science commented on how the course helped him view the everyday aspects in a new light, “I had already watched the movie The Great Gatsby , but once we talked about fashion and postmodernism in Gatsby , I watched the movie again and could actually appreciate the movie better, and felt awed at the “Gatsby-esque” features in it!” For Sai Tejo Kiran, Department of Civil Engineering, “I realised the difference the course has made to me in terms of the perspective I get when I watch a movie or a television series, or when I read a book of late. I am paying more attention to the details.”
Students also made presentations on topics representing different aspects of popular culture, including the campy nature of the recent Sherlock Holmes films; evolution of jeans; comic books and graphic novels; cultural impact of television sit-coms; sports culture; surrogacy; poster art; advertisements; Internet memes; video games, etc. Most participants found these presentations ‘fascinating’ and ‘informative’ because these helped “connect everyday things to the theories we did in class.”
Method mattersIn an interview, Marshall McLuhan recalls one of his early teaching experiences, “I confronted classes of freshmen and suddenly realised that I was incapable of understanding them. I felt an urgent need to study their popular culture: advertising, games, movies. It was a pedagogy, part of my teaching programme. To meet them on their grounds was my strategy in pedagogy: the world of pop culture.” Teaching a course in popular culture therefore, can be an enriching experience provided it is interactive and participatory in nature, where boundaries between high and low cultures are blurred to an extent. So, is popular culture easy to talk about and teach, because it is so easily accessible? Or is it difficult to bring into the classroom because it makes it necessary to theorise our everyday and taken-for-granted lives and experiences? R. Adarsh, a fourth–year civil engineering student mused, “It is tough to be a pop culture nerd. There is just too much to watch, read and listen to,” and Subhendu Rongali, an undergraduate student from the Department of Bio-technology realised how popular culture and arts are the very foundations of our society. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between.
The writer is associate professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras
