Feature: The Emerging Field of Popular Culture Studies
MSU faculty spearheaded the study of popular culture and now are the international leaders behind this exciting, emerging field.
A few months ago, J. K. Rowling published the final volume of her seven volumes about her character, Harry Potter. To say that the series was a smash hit worldwide is to understate the situation. While figures differ, most indicate that her last volume sold 11 million copies in the first day. Meanwhile, the first five have been made into movies, (the sixth is in production) and marketers are offering a wide variety of Harry Potter toys and games, and even Harry Potter chewing gum.
Rowling is now one of the wealthiest women in the world. What makes the Harry Potter phenomenon so significant is that it is the essence of popular culture. And it is in the field of popular culture that faculty at Michigan State University have acted as founder, been prominent scholars, leaders of the National Popular Culture Association and created one of the very top programs in the nation.
Gary Hoppenstand, professor and director of the undergraduate program in American Studies, is a former president of the Popular Culture Association, former editor of the Journal of Popular Culture, and editor of the just-published The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture. He explains why the study of popular culture is important:
“The prevailing reason why we should study popular culture is because of its intimate and all-pervading connection to our daily lives,” he explains. “It consumes all aspects of the way we live today (as it also did in the past), from what we eat, to how we dress, to how we communicate, to how we entertain ourselves.
“And since knowledge is power, it is best to examine critically our relationship to that which so vigorously reflects and affects the way we think and behave. To study popular culture is to study ourselves in our entirety.”
Harry Potter and his friends are, clearly, only a small part of popular culture. For example, sports culture is part of popular culture, including everything from fantasy leagues to tailgating and from extreme sports to sports talk radio. Television is also very much a part of popular culture. The increase in the number of TV channels that allowed for the creation of MTV, now also allows for all manner of niche shows from home and garden programming to the military channel. Video games, once focused on versions of Pong, have increased to draw enormous numbers of devotees. Halo 3, for example, debuted on September 25 with a U.S. sales record of $194 million, making it more lucrative than any contemporary movie from Hollywood (the U.S. record opening-day box office, set by Spider-Man 3, totaled only $67 million).
Slightly more traditional areas of popular culture study include science fiction literature, sea literature, senior culture and aging, soap operas, travel and tourism, vampire movies and books, Western literature and films, women’s literature, collegiate culture, comic art, detective fiction, dime novels and juvenile books. International area studies as well as minority studies are also included in popular culture. Besides these, popular culture focuses on motorcycle culture, celebrity culture, and the growing world of video games. In all, there are hundreds of focus areas, too numerous to list here.
One of the more obvious areas of study for popular culture is television. It has changed enormously in the last 50 years. Popular culture examines these changes over time, but also studies the shows themselves. Scholars discuss the changing nature and appeal of situation comedies, the shift in television humor over the last few decades, and one panel discussed the gospel according to Pa Cartwright (Bonanza). Academics have always been particularly drawn to analyzing science fiction on TV. Programs such as Star Trek and Stargate and their many spin offs as well as Battlestar Galactica have been examined much as literature is today. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another such program, but so are Lost and Virginia Mars. Understanding “reality TV” is a constant source of study within popular culture. All these shows can be analyzed based on the content of the programming, the issues they speak to directly, or the societies and relationships that they posit. Equally important is to understand who watches the programs and why and what does the decision to watch a particular program say about specific segments of U.S. society.
Popular culture is not limited to the last few years. In fact, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens are also included. They are studied in terms of how they typified and defined the culture of their time and how more contemporary audiences view them through the prism of their era.
The breadth of popular culture opens up a new and important world of study for people trying to understand why we are like we are and why people define themselves as they do at various times and in varying situations. But the very breadth of popular culture also makes it difficult to define. The usual definition is that popular culture is the culture of people in their everyday lives. It is the culture that people work with and deal with on a daily basis and defines their lives. This type of definition, however, is overly broad and tends to include folk culture and folklore, mass culture, and even elite culture. The actual parameters of popular culture are still being debated and I suspect that there will be no definitive conclusion any time soon.
The best way to understand popular culture is to examine it on a historical basis—and to also look at the role MSU played in its founding. The place to start is with the advent of American Studies in the 1930s; it was a reaction to the elite culture of the time that focused on a canon of works that defined education. American Studies wanted to examine more texts and use more interdisciplinary means to understand the changing American culture. American Studies succeeded in opening up a new field of inquiry, but much like the individuals who advocated for an elite culture, American culture was not particularly amenable to popular culture. It seemed to them to be low culture, focusing not on the great ideas, but on the folks who read popular literature, watched television, and went to sporting events. Ultimately, it was the inability of American Studies to accept popular culture that led to the founding of the Popular Culture Association.
Russel Nye from MSU and Ray Browne from Bowling Green State University were the driving force behind the development of the field. That the impetus for this movement was largely Midwestern is not surprising. Not willing to accept that Midwestern culture was not as sophisticated or complex as that of the East, these men held the first meeting of the Popular Culture Association at the Kellogg Center at MSU in 1971. Scholarly papers discussed a broad range of topics, but one of the first panels dealt with how to introduce popular culture into the curriculum and how to teach the subject to students. Other presentations included talks on toys as popular culture, the role of Busby Berkeley movies in the New Deal, television, black actors and programs.
That Russel Nye should be involved with this effort and be one its founders is not surprising. One of the best teachers and scholars ever to work in East Lansing, Nye saw culture as broad and did not denigrate the cultures of the common people. He understood that there were many segments of US society and each contributed to the whole. Nye was a University Distinguished Professor at MSU and won the Pulitzer Prize (1945) for his biography, George Bancroft, Brahmin Rebel. He was the author of numerous other books including, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America, Fettered freedom; civil liberties and the slavery Controversy, 1830-1860, andMidwestern Progressive Politics; A Historical Study of Its Origins and Development, 1870-1950.
His co-founder Ray Browne was also a prominent teacher and scholar. Browne was the driving force behind the growth of the Popular Culture Association and founder of the Journal of Popular Culture and the Popular Press which published many of the early works in popular culture. He was the secretary-treasurer of the association until 2002.
Nye would have been surprised at how his vision grew, and I know that Ray Browne is delighted with the continuing development and strength of the organization. At the last yearly meeting in spring, 2007, 2,850 faculty participated in the conference offering papers and commentary. PCA now has six regional conferences a year ranging from 150 participants to the Southwest regional meeting which hosts 900 faculty and researchers. The latest addition is the Oceanic regional which meets yearly in Hawaii. The PCA has also been active internationally hosting a meeting overseas every other year. The last meeting in summer, 2007 was held in Iceland and in 2009, PCA will be meeting in Finland. The organization is also affiliated overseas with groups such as the Australian, New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA).
Of considerable note is the stature of the Journal of Popular Culture (JPC) as the preeminent journal in the field. It is now published six times a year and has a paper circulation of 10,000. The number of subscribers is still growing, but increasingly libraries and private subscribers are choosing to receive the journal electronically. In fact, for the last year numbers are available, almost 150,000 articles were electronically downloaded from the Journal. Currently, the acceptance rate for the JPC is 14 percent, making it one of the most exclusive academic journals.
What makes the growth and development of the field most exciting is the important role that MSU continues to play. Currently, MSU boasts three past presidents of the PCA, Douglas Noverr, associate dean, College of Arts and Letters; Gary Hoppenstand, professor, Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Culture (WRAC, which replaced the old Department of American Thought and Language); and John Bratzel, also of WRAC. Moreover, Noverr is the international director of PCA, Hoppenstand is the editor of the JPC, and Bratzel serves as executive director of the whole organization. Supporting MSU’s efforts is the dean of Arts and Letters, Karin Wurst.
WRAC is also the home of the University’s American Studies Program which now offers a number of popular culture courses both at the graduate and undergraduate level. One area of growth is in the study of the entertainment industry. One course dealing with this subject is set and another is under development. The classes are joint with the College of Communication Arts and Sciences. The courses respond to the amazing growth of video gaming, blogs, and facebook-type communications. How people use and understand these new communications fields is important for understanding the popular culture of U.S. society.
Popular culture has come a long way since the first meeting 36 years ago. Faculty must develop new focuses as culture in the United States changes rapidly. Popular culture is leading the way and MSU is clearly in the vanguard. For more information about popular culture, visit pcaaca.org.
John F. Bratzel, , ’69, M.A. ’71, Ph. D. ‘74, received his doctorate from MSU in Latin American history and is currently an MSU professor in the Dept. of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Culture. He is a past president and now executive director of the Popular Culture-American Culture Association. He has held a variety of administrative positions at MSU and has addressed parents and students at summer orientation for many years. Bratzel’s recent books include The Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture, Volume 2, Latin America (Greenwood, 2007); Teaching Canada and Mexico (National Council for the Social Studies, 2006), and Latin America During World War II (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). He has also authored numerous articles and delivered many academic papers. John Bratzel is married and has two children.
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD POPULAR CULTURE
MSU has a long history of significant publications in popular culture studies starting with Russel Nye’s ground breaking work, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (1970). Building on MSU’s popular culture tradition and coupled with its strong global presence, professor Gary Hoppenstand in the Dept. of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Culture (previously American Thought and Language) has just published The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture.
While the title contains the word “Encyclopedia,” it is not the type of traditional compendium one imagines of 30, darkly-bound volumes with an alphabetical listing. Hoppenstand’s encyclopedia is divided into six regional volumes: North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Each volume is divided into the same 15 subject areas, such as art, architecture, dance, fashion and appearance, film, food and foodways, literature, radio and television, and sports. This makes it possible for the reader to gain a general overview of each topic by region and also to compare various cultures.
Hoppenstand is the general editor of the entire set, but each of the volumes was superintended by an expert in the field. John Bratzel, also a professor in WRAC, edited the volume on Latin America. The books, by all accounts, are selling well and represent another achievement in the area of popular culture and international engagement for MSU.
For more information, visit www.greenwood.com/catalog/GR3255.aspx.