Fandom vs. The Canon: Why Pop Culture Belongs in School
From Tolstoy to Taylor Swift
I think most of us grow up feeling like schoolwork is the opposite of a fun, leisure time activity. Even if we enjoy school. I always loved reading as a kid, and school never felt boring, but there was a huge difference between reading Sweet Valley Kids and The Babysitter’s Club under my covers with a flashlight past my bedtime vs. reading Fahrenheit 451 and To Kill a Mockingbird for school. Obviously, the former assigned titles are important novels I appreciate much more as an adult, but reading them for school? Not a fan. For many, leisure reading and assigned texts feel like they exist on separate planes.
In college, I had an English professor who spoke with a classic 90s-era west coast valley girl accent, like Cher Horowitz in Clueless, but at 2x speed. In that accent, she pontificated about Faulkner and other modern academic canon literature in a way that made me feel utterly unintelligent by comparison. She was the smartest person I’d encountered in my collegiate journey, and she casually dropped complicated words I didn’t know the meaning of into her discourse.
One day she let it slip that she was planning a new class for the next semester: a feminist literature course focused on…Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As in, the TV show. This was around the year 2000, so Buffy was a huge part of pop culture. When a few of my classmates scoffed–yes, they actually audibly scoffed–she looked them dead in the eyes with pity and said, “You’re English majors. You’ll never be able to watch anything in peace ever again.” Reader, this former undergraduate English major confirms that she was correct.
Years later, I can’t watch anything without analyzing the text. A close treading of popular culture artifacts is what I would consider a wild and exciting Friday night. And I know I’m not alone. There is a growing trend of fandom-based academic courses in higher education that I wish was the norm when I was getting my degree. Pop culture courses offer new entry points into critical thinking, cultural theory, and interdisciplinary studies, whether it’s the study of fandom itself, or bringing unexpected texts–like a hit TV show about a vampire slayer–into a literature class. Pop culture has become both a legitimate and valuable academic pursuit, and this raises questions about how we measure the quality of a work in order to study it from an academic perspective.
The old literary canon and introduction of culture studies
Up until the 1980s, English and American Literature departments across colleges and universities studied a particular canon. In a 2015 interview with Literary Hub, Jane Gallop, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee stated, “The canon as it was…in the 70s was really gone by the 90s; it is a completely different canon…there’s also a lot more reading of various kinds of non-high-literary texts. It moved in every direction…We started reading women. We started reading men of color. We started reading people from outside of Europe. We started reading things that nobody thought of as literature.” The rise of Literary Theory changed the way academics studied texts, and the definition of what constituted as academically worthy transformed.
During the 1960s and 1970s, as literature studies were changing in response to modern cultural shifts, institutions in academia began to develop Cultural Studies as a discipline. The field officially can be traced back to British literature scholars Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, who recognized the importance of studying everyday life. According to this piece on the British Academy blog, “Each of these thinkers knew there was a minor tradition of studying culture ‘from below’; that is, the cultural practices and rituals of everyday life associated with ordinary people, or with groups and populations who did not belong to the powerful social classes or to the political elites.” In other words, they asserted that studying, for example, a modern ladies’ fashion magazine had the same academic weight as studying the established classics.
When a third founder of the discipline, Jamaican-British literature scholar Stuart Hall, became the director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the UK, he continued the work of Williams and Hoggart. The “Birmingham School” as it came to be known signaled an academic paradigm shift: the interdisciplinary study of culture began to gain legitimacy, though definitely not overnight. Communications Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London Angela McRobbie writes,
“When I graduated from my first degree in English Literature and Sociology in 1974, few literature departments would have considered a thesis on the subject of girls’ magazines as legitimate. And in sociology the topic of young women and their leisure activities could only be filed, absurdly, under the idea of ‘deviance’. But in Birmingham, it made complete sense as a subject for investigation.”
Today, it is widely accepted that film, TV, and music can be studied as scholarly texts, but there will always be a disconnect between what is considered “high” and “low” art worthy of inspection on a higher education level. However, as McRobbie concludes, “perhaps this constant questioning of the grounds of validity continues to tell us a story about the place and value of culture in society.”
While in graduate school, I wandered into a specialized library for media studies one day. I browsed the shelves, which were mostly filled with bound dissertations from former students. One caught my eye: it was a psychological study of the effect of daytime soap-opera viewing. My mom had watched soap operas when I was growing up, and I came to love them too. I always thought of soaps as lacking in deep storytelling but they were fun, like candy. Junk food for the brain. How exciting to find something so deeply pop cultural inside a prestigious university library.
I checked it out for extracurricular (read: fun) reading, as it wasn’t related to any of my coursework. The conclusion of the paper was that women who watched soap operas weren’t just consuming what we might collectively regard as mindless TV. While the storylines were fantastical, they were able to project their own real life anxieties onto the characters, psychologically finding catharsis in their busy lives as mothers and homemakers. The study made me realize that consuming pop culture is never a “guilty pleasure” or devoid of meaning; it was right there in this dissertation that pop culture could heal your brain in a real way, especially if the text in question spoke directly to your particular demographic. And that is worth studying.
Fandom across academic disciplines
I love this particular 90s sitcom trope: the setting is high school, and instead of a stuffy academic (think: Mr. Feeny on Boy Meets World), the new teacher rides a motorcycle to school and sits on the desk (think: Mr. Turner), asking students to throw out their textbooks and read a comic book as homework. Yes, this is a real Boy Meets World storyline from an episode that results in a debate between educators: should students read what the old canon of academia expects them to (that they find utterly boring) or is it a teacher’s responsibility to engage young minds with literature that they find more accessible? This “cool teacher” trope of encouraging alternative reading and finding knowledge outside of classroom redundancy is so popular that it occurred at least once on every TV show I watched as a teen.
Pop culture is a mirror of society, but often course reading is not, or it doesn’t seem like it could be. Especially if students don’t see themselves in a text, and struggle to find a thread of relatability. One argument for fandom in academia via fannish content is that it meets students where they are in their everyday lives. When the content is engaging, accessible, and feels familiar to their lived experience, it lowers the barrier to critical thinking.
In a scene in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, feminist Kat (Julia Stiles) argues in her English class that reading Hemingway feels incomplete at best and a celebration of misogyny at worst. She argues that they could be opening the syllabus to read Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Bronte, Simone de Beauvoir—figures that speak to her experience as a woman instead of always reading texts by white men. It’s a poignant (and hilarious) scene because the students all hail from different backgrounds, but it speaks to the lack of intersectionality in the course reading. In another scene, Kat is seen reading The Bell Jar for fun and Heath Ledger’s Patrick famously gets her attention in a bookstore by asking her about Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
The irony here is that 10 Things I Hate About You, an iconic popular movie from 1999, is a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare’s works are studied in high schools and universities all over the world and exist in the upper echelon of canonical literature. But at the time he lived, William Shakespeare’s plays were considered pop culture, and he didn’t even publish them. He was considered an entertainer, and theater was generally thought of as low brow, for the masses. Shakespeare met audiences where they were: his work reflected their own lives back at them, much like a modern limited series drama that drops on one of our streaming platforms is a mirror to our lived experience. At some point, the works of Shakespeare transcended into the literary canon of Western literature, probably because his well established tropes provide timeless insight into the human condition. But in his own time, he was just providing entertainment.
Case studies: pop culture in the classroom
There is an almost endless list of college courses that have introduced fandom and pop culture into their curriculum. And fandom itself has been carved into its own discipline, like this DePaul University minor program, Fandom Cult Media and Subculture, out of their College of Communications. As fandom evolves, it deserves expanded courses of study across both the humanities and sciences. Star Trek has long been studied across both literature and science over several disciplines, like media studies, STEM fields, and even language.
At New York University in 2022, The Clive Davis Institute introduced a course on Taylor Swift, the first of its kind. Taught by Rolling Stone’s brittany spanos, it focused on themes in Swift’s work as well as her evolution as an artist and the greater topic of pop singer/songwriters. From there, other universities, including Harvard, offered courses across disciplines from cultural studies like close reading Swift’s lyrics as novels and examining queer subtexts, to sociology and media studies, examining branding and the effects of her fandom on communities.
As evidenced by my own collegiate experience, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the most popular fandom topics at universities. In 2012, Slate set out to find the fandoms that were most studied in academia and found that more than double the papers, essays and books could be attributed to the study of Buffy (or, Buffyology) than any other franchise at the time. Even today, fans come back to Buffy as a rich text that can be studied in terms of gender conversations, feminist studies, masculinity, family dynamics, sociology, ethics and spirituality, media studies, and more. I have to wonder what that Slate study would glean today! But other franchises in their results in 2012 included Alien, This Simpsons, The Wire, and The Matrix.
Colleges have also embraced Beyoncé. In 2010, Rutgers offered a course entitled “Politicizing Beyoncé” examining race, gender, and politics through the lens of her career. Other universities followed suit. In 2025, a new course was introduced at Yale: “Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music” taught by African American Studies professor Daphne Brooks, covering the artist’s career as a study on Black history and social movements. Even the University of Copenhagen offered “Beyoncé, Gender and Race,” with Professor Erik Steinskog who expressed that their goal was to introduce Black feminist thought, a topic that isn’t well known in Scandinavia.
As a student, I took a class for my English degree called “Writing New York” at New York University. Most of us don’t remember every syllabus, or every book we read in school. But I remember so much of that course many years later. We studied the iconic poetry of Walt Whitman alongside the lyrics of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.” There was a whole unit on the punk scene of CBGB, the legendary bar that sat on the ground floor of a building just blocks away from our classroom, and examined lyrics written by The Ramones and Patti Smith.
We read the beat poets: Ginsberg and Kerouac, who famously hung out at the bars all around our campus like White Horse Tavern (where Dylan Thomas allegedly consumed 18 shots of whiskey just before his death) and the West End by Columbia University where I spent many hours as a graduate student. We dug pretty deep into Pete Seeger and his activism through folk music, and of course, Bob Dylan. What I realized in that class was that pop culture is literature; it is history. The musicians and poets we studied were tied directly to massive social movements and significant historical events.
Anything can be elevated to an academic pursuit
Ask any college student or take a look at a course catalog, and you’ll find that there is a natural tension between classical canon and cultural relevance that shifts over time. What would Shakespeare’s peers have been reading if they were attending college the way we know it at the time of his popularity? And had they known that the entertainer that they loved would be regarded as one of the most important voices in literature for hundreds of years, would that have changed their experience of his work as pop culture?
One thing I loved to do at school was go to the research library and pull copies of Cosmopolitan and Ladies’ Home Journal from the 1920s through the 1950s. Those old magazines could tell me what readers of the past cared about: the ads for vacuum cleaners were just as relevant to me as the interviews with famous actors of the day. It made me wonder if those pages served as an actual mirror to their societies, or portrayed an idealized one? It made me think about how a scholar from the next generation might pull issues of Seventeen Magazine from the 1990s to try to learn about what my generation cared about as teens, considering both what exists on those pages and what is glaringly absent. The very act of looking back and examining the meaning and context of a piece of literature, popular or not, makes it an academic pursuit.
Fans who analyze their fandoms in real time are indeed elevating the content to something worthy of study. It’s not necessarily the content that matters, but the critical framework and structure through which it is examined. I am a firm believer in that there are no guilty pleasures: only content that you enjoy for no other reason than you enjoy it. And nobody should ever feel guilty for consuming content that they love. But if I can apply an academic framework to a discussion of Bravo’s Summer House scandal and drama-filled reunion, you bet I am going to!
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