What is popular culture? Here are examples from your responses:
Music: Beyonce, Beatles, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Madonna
Books: Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code
Blockbuster Movies
Celebrities: Paris Hilton
American Idol, Reality TV, Daily Show, Desperate Housewives
blue jeans, MacDonalds, Ipods, The Gap
From your definitions:
trends the mainstream is following
majority culture, fads
"regular joes getting a shot at stardom"--re. American Idol
"Cool" "hot" "hip"
what the average person living in a particular time period is familiar with
the latest craze
what is wanted by the dominant majority or middle class
accessible and non-exclusive
mass culture, zeitgeist
changes very quickly
entertaining
Comment: some popular culture is popular in the sense of "widely liked": for this we use words like "mainstream," "blockbuster," "bestseller," "top 40 hit." It might be helpful to use the term "mass culture" here. Some examples of popular culture like garage bands, Anime, or Sci fi, are not mainstream or widely liked in that way. They are popular in the sense of "of the people." In addition, some works or genres start off as as localized products of specific groups and then are discovered by mainstream audiences, (often with the help of corporations,) as in the case of hip hop and rap, or rock music in general--pop culture becomes mass culture.
I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say that the U.S. has provided unusually fertile conditions for the growth of both popular culture and mass culture--how might our economic, social, educational, and/or political conditions have promoted the development of pop culture? How do other countries differ?
A few questions that we will be considering over the next few weeks:
What is the difference between "high" and popular culture?
What conditions need to be in place for popular culture to develop and survive?
What is "good" popular culture? what isn't good?
Why do we call some forms of entertainment "guilty pleasures"?
What is wrong with "mere entertainment"? or rather, why do people criticize works that are entertaining?
Both jazz and the novels of Charles Dickens started out as popular culture by any of our definitions. Are they still? If not, how can we describe the change?
The Rise of the Novel:
My final question leads us into the reading for the course: the novel is one of the most influential examples of a "popular" genre in literary history. The novel as we know it grew up during the 18th century. Throughout the semester we will be asking in what way is this a popular art form and considering among other things its social and religious context, writers, audience, generic models, and evolution.
