Defending Popular Culture

It should seem odd, in this day when the Twentieth Century has produced such a wealth of important, relevant or simply read texts for us to advance our our thoughts ideas and principles, that popular culture and the study of it should still come with such a stigma.

One of the students asked yesterday why trash was a 'bad' word, with many of the others concurring that it wasn't, and that the texts they were studying (including a series of discussions on the science fiction of Lost which ranged through structuralism to deconstruction to post modernism to implicit advertising to utopian vision) had a growing validity as documents of their life practices as well as tracking the cultural involvement of society and the media. "But isn't it really social conformist?" one of the students challenged another one. "Not really..." was the fast answer.

The thing comes down to naming  - something Mark Grimsley was discussing on War Historian awhile ago. "If I'd known this course was about..." said one student yesterday... 'Intellectualising Trash' has a far more overt stand than 'Understanding Popular Culture'.

I think the course is going to produce some fiery students this year, if the first seminars were anything to go by. Whether or not there will be any students at all taking this course (or a version of it) is for today to decide.

I've been putting together some work about the role of science fiction in war together recently, adding my ideas about how these have been formed and trying to find if anyone else has done work on it. In very specific areas, yes, but not much across a broad spectrum. And more trash fiction about war throughout the Twentieth Century. There is definitely a couple of papers between them there. And I finally renewed my Reader's Pass, which expired after the last thesis dash.