pop culture takes it in the gut (again!)
i was talking with a colleague today about last night's class and told her that during class i revealed my obsession with the o.c. as i said so, i also noted my degree of hesitation and possible embarrassment as i explained the premise of the show to her and at the re-realization that i am an adult who rents and/or borrows dvds of the oc to watch on my laptop. hmmm... perhaps there is something valuable here - the reasons why we associate certain emotions to particular cultural artifacts may be significant for understanding how these texts (broadly defined) are situated in our lives.
for me, i can't seem to get enough of teen drama in part b/c i wasn't allowed to watch such programming during my actual adolescence. im sure there's more to it - maybe that's my question for the semester:
what exactly makes a guilty pleasure so guilty?
it also seems that pop cultural texts evoke more feelings of guilt and certainly more explanation than the "high" cultural texts, yet as i keep hearing, shakespeare's works were pop culture at the time he wrote them. so maybe we need to stick around for another two hundred years to see mtv's the real world revered in the same way...??
posted by lalitha @ 6:28 PM
2 Comments:
sorry to butt in on your class blog but i just wanted to say i'm proud to have fed your o.c. obsession. :) i'm with you on the embarrassment and guilt issue, though. even last year when i expressed my dismay at our class being scheduled at the same time as the o.c., the distinct thought that i shouldn't be divulging my shame in a grad class did cross my mind. little did i know we were all of the same mind...
but on the subject of guilty pleasures, doesn't acknowledging them as guilty and then continuing to partake in them actually add to our pleasure? i think there's definitely something thrilling about active rebellion (even on the smallest level), and particularly when it's our own norms/standards that we're rebelling against. certainly, the o.c. is widely regarded as popular vs. "high" culture, but we ourselves label it as trashy within the realm of popular culture -- and that's part of why we like it, isn't it?
great to hear from you, c! that's right - you *did* feed my obsession :)
you raise an important point on the whole topic of guilty pleasures... are we (can we be, do we want to be) immune to them?
in yoga last night, the woman leading the class said that although it is in our "nature" to judge, that we must work hard not to give in to this base impulse and awareness of this might be a way around it. not sure where i stand on this just yet, but the connection to your point might be: to what extent is this judging a social practice that we all willingly participate in...?
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