Using Popular Entertainment to Understand Literature

Tim Stark

High school English teacher Nancy Schnog wrote in an August 24, 2008, article in the Washington Post about the challenge of getting today's teens to appreciate reading, especially the great works of literature: "It's our job to take digital natives—teens saturated with images in video games and on YouTube—and get them to strike up a relationship with picture-less chains of black print and focus on the decidedly internal rewards of classical literature. More and more, this mission feels like blind idealism."

Idealism? Yes. Blind idealism? Not necessarily, although it often does feel that way.

Ideally, students enter my composition course with a commitment to prepare for and participate in class. For their efforts, they should expect to leave class armed with a basic set of writing methods, interpretative approaches, and critical-thinking strategies that they can use successfully in endeavors of any scope and size.

Yet, in light of Schnog's realistic assessment, what's a 21st century teaching professional to do? My suggestion: Embrace the digital dynamic as a path to student success.

Like any educator, I work to help people want to learn, and I see pop-culture signifiers and otherwise ephemeral texts as inviting, entry-level access points. Print advertising; commercials; banner ads; and clips from films, TV shows, and Web-based video sites reliably introduce my students to significant literary tropes and writerly techniques. Starting with the simple and familiar, many of my students take these lessons into studies of more complex and important works, choosing to hunt and gather examples in both popular and classical literature.

But Is It Art?

For example, after a class session on the use of central, "controlling" symbols that are often revealed in opening or crucial scenes of films, a number of students rushed to tell me about the movie Crash.

"You have to see it, Mr. Stark. It's got that motif thing!"

Absolutely! They eagerly discussed their insights far beyond simple thumbs-up reviews. They applied an analytical process that helped them to better understand a story that wasn't just "old book stuff." Many students get suspicious that teachers force or arbitrarily devise interpretations of literary works. For some reason, when students see such literary techniques demonstrated first in commercials, movies, and TV shows, they not only accept them, but they also figure out how to find them for themselves—and they get a kick out of doing it.

Many continue to share similar discoveries beyond classroom boundaries. They have a great interest in literary critique and a practical respect for the art and craft—the hard, worthy work—of writing. They interact with literature more actively by looking for specific structural and descriptive elements. With this increased awareness, gained through pop-culture texts, they confidently approach naturally interesting texts and explore classics and required readings with less hesitation.

In one case, the opening of a rather obscure film, Julia, helped a group of my regular, non-English-major students flesh out pentimento as a literary theme. This art history term fits the story, a reflection on a life full of regret for unfortunate choices and accidents, well. This is fairly complex material, to be sure. But, more than the movie's content, we focused our discussion on its use of a framing device, which is a technique often found in "real" literature.

Certainly, this approach involves risks, but source material is abundant. When one example induces glassy-eyed stares, you can substitute others quickly. Potent examples can be found in excerpts from the movies Sideways, Warm Springs, and Forrest Gump (all experiments in extended metaphor) or My Cousin Vinny, the faux biopic Talladega Nights, and the Olsen twins' It Takes Two (which include clever parallelisms and "claim and support" reasoning). These examples only scratch the surface of available resources.

And Now for Something Completely Different!

Different, maybe . . . but not so much. Students can claim the vital tools of observation, analysis, and interpretation as their own intellectual property. These tools can be sharpened on familiar examples culled from the students' world of disposable entertainment in a digital environment. The process helps outfit them with the tools they need to build on the familiar—all the way up to what may be, more or less, the undiscovered country of classic literature.

"Lowbrow" materials can help our students make high-concept connections as they read between the lines of great works and all around the content of their own texts. Knowing this, educators can, in turn, value these unlikely resources for how they can be used, despite our perceptions of what they are (or aren't). Today's students can be more deeply engaged and more highly motivated to learn by the use of seemingly superficial texts. By analyzing them, we can take the highest possible pedagogical road by recycling litter found along the wayside of the information superhighway that winds through contemporary digital culture—including our classrooms—where our students live and learn.

Tim Stark is an English department instructor at Emmanuel College in Franklin Springs, Ga. He teaches freshman composition courses with traditionally enrolled students and high school students dual-enrolled for both secondary and college credit through the state's Accel program.