In Interdisciplinarity, Joe Moran explains various viewpoints about the significance of pop culture in cultural studies, but what stood out to me was cultural critic John Frow’s explanation of “the commodification of high culture and the democratization of low culture” (Moran 69). Frow’s belief that both traditionally highbrow and lowbrow forms of literature have an impact on pop culture today challenges the stereotype of English majors as pretentious scholars who only place value on works they deem worthy of study. After all, if classics written by Shakespeare and Dickens are recycled over and over again in different forms as a part of mainstream culture, then it seems that a wide variety of people would be familiar with the themes, characters, and concepts of these works. Those who study English aren’t special or exclusionary because they read classics; classics are incorporated into modern texts, movies, plays, children’s books, and more.
While thinking about this, it became clear to me just how present classic literature has been throughout my life. When I was younger, the Disney movie The Lion King introduced me, although I couldn’t have known it at the time, to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Years later, when I read Hamlet, the plot already seemed familiar to me – I had come across it in so many forms already. Plus, most people know some of the play’s most famous lines because Hamlet is quoted in numerous television shows, movies, and books. I also has easy-to-read, abridged versions of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe when I was little, which familiarized me with forms of “highbrow culture” before I knew anything about classic literature. These examples, and undoubtedly many others, support Frow’s belief that literature is available to a wide variety of people, not just those who study it. I’m not saying that watching The Lion King is a substitute for reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but the classics have become so ingrained in modern culture that it’s hard to say that English majors are pretentious about which texts they read. Choosing to study literature means not only analyzing the work itself, but understanding its impact on society and how it has been drawn from countless times by other forms of entertainment.