OSU Goes Pop

Class Action

OSU Goes Pop

"Modern classics" get academic attention with Ohio State's multidisciplinary minor

By Tracy Zollinger Turner

Although he is loath to admit it, when Jared Gardner was once stumped during an exam, his mind turned to a less-than-traditional source for the answer. The memory of the cover of a comic book—in this case, a comic book of Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables that he had read as a kid from an unusual series his father owned—pulled him through.

"It's one of those secrets you feel like you're not supposed to tell when you work at an academic institution," said Gardner, these days an associate professor of English at Ohio State University. "But I read almost nothing but comics past the age that most would consider appropriate."

"I knew my classic literature before I got serious about it, through comics? I came at it all backwards."

Perceptions of popular culture as an academic subject have changed since Gardner was in graduate school, studying early American literature and film. Recently, he chaired a successful initiative to establish popular culture studies as a multidisciplinary minor at OSU.

There were already plenty of courses that explored mass media in a variety of departments. Coalescing them into one minor was, in part, a service to students who formerly had to forage through the university's behemoth course lists to find what they were looking for.

But some guidelines were also established to make sure that the study of pop culture at OSU is more than MTV, Barbie, Hollywood movies and Elvis, although those touchstones are certainly hotly discussed.

Students seeking the minor are required to take one class that explores the mass entertainment outside of the United States, such as a course about Chinese opera. They also must take at least one course that examines popular culture prior to 1945.

In many cases, they learn that things considered highbrow today were the reality television of other times and circumstances.

"In the early 19th century, Shakespeare was often performed with vaudeville acts, memorized by frontier farm men, and mixed in with naughty plays and other entertainment," said Gardner.

"One of the great lessons that pop culture teaches students is how much our understanding of taste, of high and low culture, change over time. The early American literature I'm teaching includes the 18th century American novel and magazine, which were the definition of pop culture at the time," he added.

"The novel caused similar anxieties to those that comic books raised in the 1950s or video games do today."

There are also practical reasons for studying popular culture in the data deluge of the 21st century.

"On one hand, it's a golden age; on the other hand, it's a period when we're bombarded with so many choices and images and sounds?students want tools to discipline it and organize it," said Gardner. "Some students express a feeling of being at sea because there is so much. No one is a master of pop culture, but we all have the ability to come together and try and make sense of it."

Ohio, said Gardner, also has a tradition of taking popular culture seriously, which made the minor a natural fit.

Bowling Green State University pioneered the field, establishing a popular culture department in 1973, and offering the only graduate program in it in the country. And OSU's own Cartoon Research Library has long worked to preserve a form of widespread entertainment and social commentary that could have easily turned to dust.

Several other major institutions across the country have also adopted the minor, so its acceptance as a serious form of academic study is certainly on the rise.

"I spent a lot of time in graduate school thinking I had to put away childish things," said Gardner. "The message I got was that it's fine to be interested in that stuff, but you don't write a dissertation about it. I wanted to write a dissertation about the history of American magazines and I was told that would be a career killer, so I put it aside.

"That same graduate program recently invited me back to give a talk about comics, which reminded me how much things have changed."

October 18th, 2007