Bait/Rebait: Pop Culture Has an Important Place in the English Classroom

Abstract

First, what is popular culture? It's Hallmark cards, James Whitcomb Riley, Edgar Guest, Robert W. Service, Joyce Kilmer, and Rod McKuen; it's the Katzinjammer Kids, Blondie, Snoopy, Popeye, Mickey Mouse, Pogo, Little Orphan Annie, and Doonesbury; it's Little Eva, the Hardy boys, Nancy Drew, Scarlet O'Hara, Tarzan, and Tom Swift; it's Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Will Rogers, Tom Mix, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers; it's Ellery Queen, Perry Mason, Nero Wolfe, and Sam Spade. It's Amos and Andy, Inner Sanctum, Jack Benny, and Fibber McGee and Molly; it's the Miss America Pageant, Showboat, Oklahoma, the Ice Capades, and Barnum and Bailey's Circus; it's Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and Linda Ronstadt; it's Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald; it's Dixie, Swanee River, and Carry Me Back to Old Virginny; it's Marilyn Monroe, Cecil B. De Mille, Clark Gable, and John Wayne. It's One Man's Family, Gangbusters, and Mr. District Attorney; it's Johnny Carson, Walter Cronkite, Lawrence Welk, and Liberace; it's Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, and The Martian Chronicles; it's Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, and Grand Ole Opry; it's Dragnet, I Love Lucy, Bonanza, All in the Family, and the Super Bowl; it's Reader's Digest, Life, Saturday Evening Post, National Inquirer, and Playboy. Popular culture owes its existence to the concentration, beginning in the eighteenth century, of middle-class audiences in metropolitan areas; it owes its vitality to its increasingly rapid diffusion through the mass media. Its content ranges in spectra from banal to bizarre, sentimental to hard-