Critical and Classroom Perspectives on High and Low Culture

Session Coordinator: Elaine Roth

Dept. of English, Indiana University South Bend

South Bend, IN 46634

elaroth@iusb.edu

“Manners, Spies, and Goths: The Implosion of Genres in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day,”

“Romance, spy-story, and psychological thriller,” as one recent critic characterized it, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948) is also a novel of manners and a documentary account of wartime London. Like other literary thrillers, Bowen’s introduces the conventions of spy fiction partly in order to subvert them, leaving unanswered basic questions about the nature and value of the information her spy is passing to the Germans. Indeed, readers have often complained that the novel’s political context is too obscure; the sympathetic Robert Kelway makes an unconvincing Nazi. While it has long been known that Elizabeth Bowen worked for British Intelligence during the Second World War, when she first started drafting The Heat of the Day, the extent of her activities in neutral Eire became clear only with the publication in 1999 of her Notes on Eire, Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill 1940-2. I will argue that the Notes significantly enlarge the political context of The Heat of the Day to include wartime tensions between neutral Eire and Great Britain. The novel’s spy story is not only shaped by the conventions of popular spy fiction, but by the conventions of the espionage report and the author’s uneasy relationship to the practice of spying.

Margaret Scanlan

Indiana University South Bend

mscanlan@iusb.edu

“Hucksters and High Science: Medieval Weather Reports”

It is all too easy to find instances in our society today of up-to-the-date reports on the scientific front cheek-by-jowl with advertisements for a contemporary equivalent of snake oil. The current issue of Scientific American includes an article reporting the latest developments in identifying the causes of Alzheimer’s disease and an advertisement for an electric belt that will sculpt one’s abs into a perfect six pack. The corpus of some 3000 plus surviving documents in or including Old English provide a much more restrictive range of documents for identifying a similar gap in Anglo-Saxon culture between learned and a popular or folk understanding of physical phenomena. This paper will explore and discuss examples of contrasting texts that provide evidence for such a comparable gap. Thus, an Old English translation of Bede’s treatise on the seasons comments explicitly on the mistaken notions of lay people concerning the phases of the moons while providing an explanation that might still be found in a 21^st-century science textbook. Latin texts written in Anglo-Saxon England may be needed to supplement the learned perspective; surviving prognostications and leechdoms will provide generous examples of folk knowledge. The co-existence of these two types of texts invite – if not prove – the conclusion that what we might call folk science contrasted sharply with a learned science in Anglo-Saxon culture.

Jim Blodgett

Indiana University South Bend

jblodget@iusb.edu

“From Low to High: Teaching Sentimental and Experimental Films”

This essay argues that film studies courses should include both high and low culture, but need to use diverse approaches to do so. While an ideological approach can reveal the assumptions circulating in familiar Hollywood genre films, such as melodramas, a formalist approach can encourage students to tackle inaccessible experimental films. Classical Hollywood melodramas such as Now, Voyager (1942) can trigger students’ suspicious resistance to the films’ sometimes painful familiarity. Seeking entry into elite discourses about which they presume they know little, students may balk at the notion that mainstream films are capable of yielding them worthwhile knowledge. In fact, genre films often provide the ideal site for ideological analysis that encourages students to identify, for example, their own class position. In contrast, despite students’ investment in encountering material considered “high culture,” many find experimental films disorienting and off-putting. A formal approach leads students to at least describe these films, and often to interpretation. Those with some student appeal work best, such as the use of popular music in Sadie Benning’s videos, the familiarity of the setting in Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), the cheery irreverence of Kenneth Anger’s films, or the use of music-video-esque montage in Decasia (2002). Despite their skepticism about low culture, in these instances, students access experimental films better through popular culture. Ultimately, film studies courses should attempt both to legitimate the analysis of low culture and to make high culture accessible.

Elaine Roth

Indiana University South Bend

elaroth@iusb.edu

“Highs and Lows in a Two-Week Cultural Immersion Experience”

This presentation questions the validity of customary approaches to teaching Mexican popular culture (here denominated “Piñata Culture”) in the intermediate level Spanish classroom, while it proposes an intellectual alternative based on “solid readings” such as Octavio Paz’s classic essay The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). This approach has already proven its effectiveness in the three two-week intensive courses I taught in the past three years. Far from setting unrealistic goals for the intermediate level student, this intensive experience accelerates the transition toward the advanced level in a rigorous manner—where language proficiency and cultural awareness blend. There are three basic steps in this formula. The first is setting a realistic level of expectations for this level. The second is the total abandonment of grammar for the sake of language. The third is the construction of meaning from an exemplary piece. Instead of worrying about formal correctness and the task of producing “good Spanish,” the student studies Mexican identity problems while (ultimately) learning better Spanish. This method observes the current trends in second language acquisition, such as Contextualized Language Instruction (Shrum and Glisan) and Content Based Instruction, while it incorporates classic views borrowed from Cultural Studies and the instruction of Culture and Civilization in chronological perspective. My objective is to de-trivialize cultural content by avoiding banal and stereotypical (Piñata) imagery. By deepening higher cultural content permeated by popular Mexican wisdom, the student makes a natural connection between “highs” and “lows,” and ultimately succeeds in displacing “Piñata Culture.”

Oscar Barrau

Indiana University South Bend

obarrau@iusb.edu