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Popular Culture Review
included because they demand a broad range of reading skills and responses.
In this new-millennium pedagogy, teachers would engage students in a
discussion among texts and help students negotiate the reading task closely and
carefully, or in Scholes’ words, “...to situate a text in relation to culture, society,
the world” (166).
According to Scholes, an Enghsh curriculum must, “...lead students to a
position of justified confidence in their own competence as textual consumer...”
(66). He calls for a major transformation of Enghsh Literature. The overarching
theme of Scholes’ pedagogy is to help students bring and use in the classroom all
that they have learned, and to develop in students the abihty to “generate new
texts, to make something that did not exist before somebody made it” (31). In
other words, a television program, an advertisement, a radio script or a talk show
could be viewed as a text and explicated by students thereby creating other forms
of writing.
Since I have taught in both hterature and communications departments, I have
attempted to meld these two very different fields of study. As a teacher/researcher,
I decided to explore the possibihty of Scholes’ argument of “generating new texts”
from a broader range of texts in general, and to see if his idea could be apphed to
one segment of popular culture today, namely, Reahty Television.
Reahty television is a major component of the mass media today. The media
focuses on reality programs in every form of mass media possible. The Survivor
contestant who is voted off the show Thursday night makes a cameo appearance
on The Early Show Friday morning. Radio disc jockeys focus on hsteners who call
in and predict who will be the next contestant ehminated from the show. Bookstores
promote books describing the modus operandi of reality television shows and
provide biographies of contestants, reveahng how the shows’ hosts employ a
screening process as well as other tidbits of information.
Over a period of two semesters I have engaged students in observing the
particular media phenomena called Reahty Television. As part of the lesson, I
explained a hterary device called Freytag’s Triangle and asked students to select a
work of literature and superimpose the Triangle over one of the Reahty Television
programs.
The German critic Gustav Freytag proposed a method of analyzing plots derived
from Aristotle’s concept of unity of action that came to be known as “Freytag’s
Triangle”. The Triangle is a type of hterary plot analysis that outhnes the movement
in a story from the introduction to its conclusion, and can be employed to analyze
the structure and unity of a text’s plot. This hterary device worked well when I
employed it in teaching hterature, but I was curious to see if the Triangle would
work in the context of a television program, and specifically, reahty television
shows.