Teaching Literature and Language through Popular Culture

Abstract

It is high time to theorize and explore what is popular as the number of texts produced and circulated in the title of popular culture are of great magnitude than that is circulated in the title of ‘high culture’. Kant draws a binary between high culture and the popular. According to him high culture which provides true pleasure is sublime and beautiful while popular culture or mass culture which provides immediate, physical pleasure is only charming or agreeable. Nevertheless, the consumption of popular culture is going on around us every now and then in form of films, television programs, reality shows, video games, magazines, chick lit, comics, pop music, rap, hip-hop and in hundreds of other forms. And this, in turn, inaugurated new vistas in teaching English language and literature. Teachers are being besieged with demands for improving their medium of instruction and teaching literature. This article attempts to view two different narratives, which are part and parcel of popular culture, as tools to teach language and literature. Literature can also be taught through popular culture as postmodernism decentralizes canonical literature and foregrounds the importance of mass culture or popular culture. The first part of this article proposes comics as a tool to make the learner understand the language with all its subtleties and nuances from the perspective of psycholinguistics. The second part is a discourse on Harry Potter narratives which helps children to learn various moral stages which are central in character analysis in literature.