Reality TV: Taking the Shows
To Another Level
The pedagogical importance of popular culture is getting close attention these
days. In cultural studies, pedagogy cannot be separated from our students’
experience of culture. One category of popular culture has its confluence in those
popular elements of culture that are produced for the people such as reality
television. Scholars like Henry Girou x provide a thoughtful argument for the
importance of including popular culture in education. In the cultural studies tradition,
Giroux argues for the necessity of reading “cultural forms as they articulate with a
whole assemblage of other texts, ideologies and practices” (13).
Richard Simon also argues for the importance of introducing popular
culture into the college classroom: “I come not to bury Bloom’s curriculum of
great books but to save it,” Simon writes in Trash Culture:
I mean this quite seriously. At a time when professors like Bloom
complain bitterly about dechning enrollments in the humanities and warn
that English departments are about to go the way of classics departments
(shrinking to near oblivion), large numbers of students make their way
into my classes, not because they love the great books of the Western
world but because they love movies and television programs. And because
Rambo is contemporary America’s Iliads they are willing to look closely
at Homer (21).
G erald G raff in Professing Literature discusses dialogues that
acknowledge the recognition that the field of literature might be on shaky ground
and that changes need to occur before English faculties fade into oblivion like
their former colleagues in Greek and Latin.
To combat this deleterious effect on the English faculty, Robert Scholes urges
literary studies professors to move beyond the classical canon and teach a broader
range of texts. In The Rise and Fall o f English: Reconstructing English as a
DisciplinCy Scholes argues that, “the remedy is to rethink or practice by starting
with the needs of our students rather than with our inherited professionalism or our
personal preference” (84). This foreshadows a curriculum where English will be a
discipline whose goal is to teach students a plethora of reading practices, a
metamorphosis that would include a wider spectrum of texts in classrooms. This
shift in pedagogy could include texts not usually considered literary genre:
television, films, speeches, and even advertisements. Texts in general would be