Teaching Literature and Language through Popular Culture

Authors

  • M. S. Raj Sree Ph. D. Research Scholar, Institute of English, University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India

Keywords:

Popular culture, Comics, Harry Potter narratives, Teaching tools

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.

References

Krashen, S. “Language teaching technology: A low-tech view”. In J.E. Alatis (Ed.), Georgetown University Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 1989, 393-407

McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics New York: Harper Collins.

Norton, B., & Vanderheyden, K. “Comic book culture and second language learners”. In B. Norton & K. Toohey (Eds.), Critical pedagogies and language learning. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004, 201-222.

Schumer, Arlen. The Silver Age of Comic Book Art. Portland, Oregon: Collectors Press. 2003.

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Published

01.04.2010

How to Cite

M. S. Raj Sree. (2010). Teaching Literature and Language through Popular Culture. Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature, 1(4), 29–33. Retrieved from https://journals.eltai.in/index.php/jtrel/article/view/JTREL010407

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 4 (2010): April

Section

Research Articles

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