Grobman - Pop Culture and Basic Writing, continue

Pop Culture and Basic Writing, cont.:

Mediating Instructors’ Responsibilities and Students’ Rights

Laurie Grobman

Pennsylvania State University, Berks-Lehigh Valley College

Although theory and practice are never separable, in my view, my task is to follow up on Laura Gray-Rosendale’s module, “Basic Writing Assignments and Pop Culture Studies,” with a theoretical discussion of pop culture and basic writing as a way to invite further dialogue. I should point out that due to logistics, I am writing this piece prior to seeing most of the engaging discussion that is likely to ensue from Laura’s module.

James Berlin, whose work with cultural studies and composition has indelibly altered the discipline, focuses cultural studies approaches in composition on “the ways social formations and practices shape consciousness” and how “this shaping is mediated by language and situated in concrete historical conditions” (101). That is, by studying pop culture artifacts, ranging from written texts to music to film and so forth (I have seen this part of the listserv discussion and, like Laura, define pop culture broadly), students can become aware of the many ways pop culture shapes who they are, what they believe, and why they believe it. In particular, Berlin emphasizes the power relations involved in the shaping of consciousness, so that the study of pop culture involves larger societal issues of justice and injustice, inclusions and exclusions, and dominant and “other.”

Perhaps even more importantly, Berlin emphasizes that all of us, including students, can resist these forces and move toward greater human agency and social and political reform:

the subject is the point of intersection of various discourses—discourses about class, race, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, and the like—and it is influenced by these discourses. Equally important, the subject in turn affects these very discourses. The individual is a location of a variety of significations but is also an agent of change, not simply an unwitting product of external discursive and material forces. The subject negotiates and resists codes instead of simply accommodating them. (103)

Through reading, discussion, analysis, group work, writing, and revising, students will, ideally, come to understand the ways cultural texts shape us and, reciprocally, how students can themselves work against those particular shapings, both individually and collectively: “As language rewrites the subject and society, the subject can rewrite language in reshaping the self and social arrangements” (111). Thus studying popular culture in composition is one way to empower students. This is particularly important for students in basic writing who are often the least empowered students in the college or university. But these students are, as Laura points out, “experts of the everyday,” and can use this expertise as a springboard for intellectual analysis and writing development.

As my brief summary of the theoretical underpinnings of pop culture studies makes clear, one primary assumption of cultural studies approaches in composition and basic writing is that popular culture reinscribes violence, consumerism, materialism, immediate gratification, selfishness, individualism, meritocracy, sexism, misogyny, prescribed gender roles, racism, heterosexism, classism, sexual exploitation of youth, etc. Therefore, by studying pop culture, students will come to understand how pop culture reinforces injustice and exclusionary practices and will want to work to resist, subvert, and revise pop culture and all it represents. But do students want to be so empowered?

The theoretical and practical sticking point, for me, is that students often don’t want to resist popular culture because pop culture adds meaning to their lives in ways that I might never understand. Many of my students often defend vigorously the violent and hateful lyrics of someone like Eminen. Many of the white and nonwhite males in my classes decry the analyses that describe whites’ embrace of rap and hip hop as “racist.” Many of my female students can not or do not want to consider that popular fashions for young women and girls objectify them as sexual objects before they are old enough to choose whether and how to use their sexuality.

My recent efforts to address these complicated issues of students’ rights to their own pop cultural discourses has been to focus specifically on youth culture, extending Henry Giroux’s analyses of youth culture to basic writing. Hoping initially to invite students to intervene in and mediate society’s rhetorical constructions of youth, I came to realize that my students in basic writing are very much invested in constructions of their generation, especially in music, television, and film.

Let me try to put this another way: even if popular culture is imposed on students by corporate culture, much of popular culture is students’ culture, students’ discourses (or at least traditional age students). These discourses belong to them and, in many ways, define them as a distinct generation. Are students not supposed to embrace their music, their movies, their TV shows, their online venues? If these aren’t their discourses, what are? Don’t they have any, and what does it mean if they do not?

I will end this introductory discussion by pointing to Laura’s approach to these thorny issues. As you probably recall, Laura does not mediate her students’ negotiations of pop culture; she resists imposing on her students the kinds of critiques Berlin highlights. I invite you to join us in these discussions by addressing the following or other questions:

What do you think about the contradiction I’ve discussed about the implicit objectives of cultural studies approaches and students’ rights to their own pop cultural discourses?
How do you mediate these contradictions in your own classrooms?
In Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth, Henry Giroux asserts that as teachers, we can challenge abhorrent representations in media culture without aligning ourselves with conservative politics. He argues that we can both protect First Amendment rights and rights to artistic expression even for material we find offensive and simultaneously “take up what it means to provide an ethical discourse from which to criticize those images, discourses, and representations that might be destructive to the psychological health of children or serve to undermine the normative foundations of a viable democracy” (6). Do you agree? What might those “ethical discourses” look like?
What are some of the other theoretical issues or concerns of pop culture in basic writing?

Works Cited