Popular Culture Review
160
watch strangers do the unthinkable on national television. There is only
so much of what’s going to be aired on television anyway, since certain
words and actions will not be presented on the show.
I could not pinpoint any specific hterature to this reality show, but I
would compare it to a romance novel that has a subplot of a twisted or
extra-marital affair. The juicy details, the illicit love affairs, people
cheating and all those other fun aspects that viewers love to sink their
teeth into, are all there.
After all, in the end. Temptation Island is more hke a Cinderella
fairytale. The prince sweeps his princess to a far-a-way land, disappears,
and then comes back on his white horse and rescues the woman he loves.
Freytag’s Triangle is a helpful tool for analyzing works of hterature. Asking
students to reflect on a hterary device such as Freytag’s Triangle in relation to
popular culture (in this study, reahty shows) enables students to gain some degree
of what Robert Scholes calls “textual power, which is the abihty to...generate
new texts, to make something that did not exist before somebody made it” (131).
Holy Family College
Dr. Fran Pelham
Works Cited
Giroux, Henry A. The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. NY: New York University
Press, 1999.
Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars. NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993: 52-53.
Marshall, James. “Saving the Profession from Itself: the Past and Future of Literary Studies.” The
College Board Review, No. 186, Fall 1998: 31-32.
Peyser, Mare. “Reality T V ’s Real Survivor.” Newsweek, No. 26, January 1, 2001: 136.
Simon, Richard K. Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999.
Streisand, Betsy. “Did You Say Reality TV? Or Surreal TV?” U.S. News and World Report, Vol. 130,
Number 3, January 22, 2001: 36-38.
Scholes, Robert. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998.
Vivian, John. The Media of Mass Communication, 5“* ed., Needham Heights, MA: Ally & Bacon,
1999: 505.