Dropkicking the Canon

I always get a little bit of a raised eyebrow when I tell people that I wrote my Master's project paper on satire in Fallout 3. Having spent a year in a digital literature class ingesting arguments that relegated the videogame form as inferior, I decided to stand up for a form that I knew was capable of far more than it was being given credit for.

What does this have to do with anything?

In class today, we discussed how children's reading habits evolve (from Goosebumps to Stephen King, for example). We discussed how you might use a text that students might find enjoyable to transition them into something out of the Canon, such as King Lear. All important topics.

Popular art, found in its multitude of forms (videogames, film, comics, magazines, etc.) is a great resource to use to "frontload" a class to prepare them for Canonical works of literature. It is important to note, however, that the frontloaded work may be as complicated as the Canonical piece you are trying to open up to them.

During my time as GTL for the Department of English in 2009-2010, I used film quite often to "frontload" a difficult text. In one case, my class and I watched Apocalypse Now before diving into Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. We spent considerable time analyzing Willard's encounter with Kurtz at the end of the movie, as it baired considerable resemblance to Marlow's encounter with Kurtz at the end of Heart of Darkness.

While I used the film to setup the novel, I found many students much more engrossed with the film. Apocalypse Now opened up a whole barrell of questions. As a result, I gave them the option of writing a comparative essay between the two.

The success of bringing in popular culture raises an important question: should we stick to the Canon? Can a piece of popular art not stand on its own in the classroom? Must it be tied to something in the Canon?

Certainly the human condition is not only tied to works deemed important by the literary elite.







Note: My MA project paper is available at: http://library2.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-09202010-095750/unrestricted/StevensonProjectPaper.pdf