Pop Culture in the Classroom

As I sat in a crowded McCosh 50 on the first day of class listening to the opening arpeggios of Bruce Springsteen's 1973 song "Growin' Up," I couldn't help but think that this was too good to be true. A Princeton class? And I'm getting to listen to a Bruce cover? For credit?

The class, SOC 205: Sociology from E Street: Bruce Springsteen's America, involves much more than just listening to the Boss, of course. Taught by Professor Mitch Duneier, the course uses Springsteen's music as a starting point for examining social issues. What's more, this pop-as-pedagogy approach really isn't that unusual these days. The Springsteen course joins a host of other classes on campuses across the country - from Princeton courses on fashion models and American bestsellers to a forthcoming Harvard course on "The Wire" - in defining the place of popular culture in the classroom.

An important inspiration for Duneier's class was the field of cultural studies - a movement founded in the 1960s that he said "did a lot to challenge the academic myths about popular culture," by arguing that any cultural artifact - including television, film, and music - can be studied as a "text."

Duneier's class uses music as its starting text. "Since I was 18 years old, music in general has been a vehicle for coming to insights about social life, and since the time that I was a teenager, my sociological imagination has been inspired as much by music as by any books that I have read," he explained.

"Cultural studies is not so much about the choice of text, but about what people are doing with those texts, how they are thinking with them," Duneier added, "which is exactly what I'm describing when I talk about how much music meant to me as a college student or even now."

While developing the class, Duneier saw an opportunity to let Princeton students link music and sociology as well. "The separation that exists between popular culture on the one hand and cultural theory on the other is something that I was interested in eclipsing in my teaching," he noted.

To break down this divide, the class listens to one of Springsteen's songs in the first lecture of each week and then reads what sociology has to say about the issues raised in the music.

In the second lecture each week, however, the "text" changes from music to people, as Duneier conducts in-class interviews with guests whose lives mirror Springsteen's songs. After using the song "State Trooper" in week four to explore punishment in America, Duneier invited a former Philadelphia police officer whose line-of-duty injury forced him to retire early, along with a man who grew up in a drug- and violence-ridden Philadelphia neighborhood, where his brother was shot and killed by a police officer.

SOC 205 is one of several recent Princeton courses have fused the worlds of academia and pop culture. This spring, professor Wendy Belcher is teaching a new comparative literature course on the unlikely topic of runway models. The class, which filled up within two hours of course registration opening, will "aim at the popularity of such shows as ‘[America's Next] Top Model,' ‘Project Runway' and ‘Gossip Girl' and uncovering what habits of thought about race and gender inform them," Belcher said in an e-mail.

But why should students at Ivy League institutions be studying Tyra Banks instead of Gustave Flaubert?

"Today's popular culture is tomorrow's high culture," Belcher explained, adding, "Why not teach a popular form on the rise, rather than only after it has become respectable or moribund?"

Comparative literature professor April Alliston, whose course on the Gothic tradition in literature lists "Twilight" on its reading list, expressed a similar sentiment. "It's as important to learn to think critically about popular culture as it is to learn to think critically about ‘the canon,' because we are all immersed in popular culture," she noted in an e-mail. "So not thinking critically about it can leave us open to being subtly influenced or manipulated by it in unexamined ways."

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While Belcher's course attempts to catch popular culture when it's fresh, William Gleason's English course on American bestsellers looks backward in time. The students read at least one contemporary bestseller but mostly examine popular books from the past. "Some [of the novels] were indeed considered mere ‘pop culture' in their own time but are now judged to have weightier cultural relevance," Gleason said, citing books such as Susanna Rowson's "Charlotte Temple" and James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans."

In fact, many now "canonical" works of fiction were popular culture when first published, Alliston noted. Her Gothic tradition course, offered again this spring, focuses on 18th- and 19th- century novels by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker that were considered pop culture in their time. But the course contains a dose of contemporary pop culture as well, by way of Anne Rice novels, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and the "Twilight" series.

Though the cultural studies movement began long ago, some think it has recently become more accepted for courses and academic work to explicitly focus on pop culture. "I think more and more faculty are well-trained in the analysis of pop culture and thus more comfortable bringing it into their classrooms," said Gleason, who will also be teaching a course this spring on children's literature. "It doesn't carry quite the same stigma that it did when I was in graduate school, for example."

Duneier echoed that statement, noting, "I feel that because of the inroads made by the field of cultural studies in the '90s that it's relatively easy for a professor today to come along and offer a course that relates very, very directly to popular culture and be taken seriously." He added that he was particularly inspired by other Princeton professors, like historian Sean Wilenz and English scholar Andrew Ross, who pioneered the teaching of cultural studies in Princeton's English department in the '80s. "In Ross' teaching and writing, he showed that even intellectuals who are interested in popular culture and think it warrants scholarly study almost always feel compelled to distance themselves from it in some fashion to maintain their cultural authority," Duneier said.

While Duneier and Belcher look to pop culture for its commentary on society, others are interested in the literary merits of the not-so highbrow. Adrian Diaz '09 wrote 101 pages on the narrative style in the ABC show "Lost" for her senior thesis. Titled "Found No End, in Wandering Mazes Lost: Science, Religion, and Narrative in ‘Lost,' " Diaz' thesis examined the show's narrative style, focusing on the use of memory, flashbacks and flash-forwards.

"I tend to make connections between things I'm learning in the classroom and things I do outside the classroom," she said in an e-mail. "So when my professor was talking about the romantic epic ‘The Faerie Queene' [by Edmund Spenser], that discussion made me think about the television show."

Once she got the approval of her thesis adviser, Jeff Dolven, Diaz used thesis funding to purchase the "Lost" DVDs and find scenes that applied to the questions she was seeking to answer. "Other students definitely thought it was cool to watch a show for my ‘research,' " she said, "even though my research in reality was a lot of the traditional kind: evenings in Firestone with books and note cards."

She advises students embarking on similar projects to be explicitly academically minded in their writing. "I found in the grading of my thesis that my enthusiasm for the topic at times was misinterpreted as mere fandom of the show," she said. "The students run that risk, and it's just something to be aware of that matters more in the pop culture stuff than in the canonical literature."

Rebecca Scharfstein '12 found herself in a similar situation last year when faced with an assignment for her writing seminar, WRI 154: Walmart Nation. Asked to explore an aspect of consumption in a recent television show, film or media report, Scharfstein chose to write about the show "Gossip Girl." While the assignment clearly encouraged the students to look deeper into pop culture, Scharfstein says she was initially slightly nervous when presenting her topic. "I could have very easily felt judged by writing a paper about ‘Gossip Girl' for an academic class, but my teacher didn't make me feel that way at all," she said.

Scharfstein said that the assignment was especially helpful to her in the context of the writing seminar, because it allowed her to focus solely on her writing instead of having to worry about analyzing complex texts. "It wasn't as much about understanding the source ... as it was about learning how to develop an argument," she said.

In addition to being able to focus on improving one specific academic skill, Scharfstein said her enthusiasm about the subject translated into the work she produced.

Duneier hopes to tap into that same excitement. "I wondered if there were some ways I could create a course that would make people who had never heard of the department and didn't know about sociology suddenly realize, ‘Wow, this is an interesting topic, and this is something I might be interested in even though I would've never thought of it before.' "

In a world where popular culture surrounds us like never before, perhaps it is not only acceptable but also essential that it have a front-row seat in the college classroom. "Popular culture represents the forms that students are more informed by and most embedded in," said Belcher. "Students must learn to question those forms, and the assumptions they forward, if they are to understand how their world and their thinking about it are shaped by forces they are not always conscious of."

After all, at the end of the day, most of us spend more time watching TV than we do reading Shakespeare - who was quite the popular entertainer in his own day.