tvtropes.org & what it implies

Cross-posted at The Valve.

Over at ARCADE, Andrew Goldstone had a post about tvtropes.org, which he describe as “is an amazing wiki devoted to the ‘tropes’ of television, film, fiction, and, potentially, everything. The organizing idea of the site is the trope, very loosely defined as any convention or pattern to be found in and around these cultural objects.” What makes TVT interesting, of course, is that it is not run by scholars, it’s run by ordinary folks, by fans. Goldstone is interested in what TVT implies about the future of the humanities. He thus takes comfort in the fact that it is formalist in method, indicating that, whatever the current state of affairs in the academy, formalist isn’t dead. He is also pleased that “the site is resolutely ecumenical in its treatment of culture.” Anything’s fair game.

He goes on to point out:

On the one hand, it means--just as media studies and cultural studies have been insisting all along--that popular culture, far from being a wasteland of zombielike acquiescence and repetition, is shot through with self-reflexivity, creative variation, and analytic thinking. Academic values and the values of other parts of culture at large may not be as divergent as we think in the darkest watches of the night.

Yes.

What interests me, at the moment, however, is the extent to which this “self-reflexivity, creative variation, and analytic thinking” reflects the success of literary and cultural studies pedagogy over the past half century (or more). Have we succeeded in creating a new kind of more or less routine public discourse about fictional texts?

Note that I’m not claiming that the academy gets sole responsibility for this, that pop culture really would be “a wasteland of zombielike acquiescence” if it weren’t for us. I don’t for a minute believe anything so silly. At the same time, I observe that it’s not as though popular culture were over there in some other universe having little or no connection with the universe in which we do our research and teach undergraduates. It’s the same universe.

The Buffyverse

Some years ago I “listened in” on web conversations among a particular group of buffistas, fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The discussions started out at the Table Talk section of Salon magazine and then migrated to an independent all-Buffy (and related matters) site called The Phoenix. The people who posted there (and, apparently, are still posting) were intelligent and articulate – probably ranging from college students to post-college folks in their 20s and 30s. There was some lit crit and cultural studies terminology tossed in, but the remarks were generally informal, but sometimes rather sophisticated.

In particular, it's quite obvious that these Buffy fans have various ways of relating to the characters in the stories. There was, of course, quite a bit of discussion of the actions, attitudes, motivations, etc. of these characters as though they were real people. What are they up to, and why? Some of this discussion is psychological in nature and some is moral.

Yet the fans were quite aware that the characters are just characters in a fiction, a TV show. Thus you would find statements about whether or not a character is "working" well and suggestions for what they should be like. There was quite a bit of discussion about what Jos Whedon, the producer, was doing or likely to do with a character. There was also discussion of the actors playing the characters and how well they did.

What's interesting is that these various modes all co-exist within the same unfolding conversation. This particular audience responded to the characters as real people and discussed them in those terms. At the same time they were aware of the characters as creatures of fiction and discussds them in those terms as well.

I don’t know just what such discussions owe to college-level courses in literature and cultural studies. But I would think there is some influence. As I’ve indicated, people don’t watch TV in one universe and take college courses in an entirely different one.

A New Baseline?

Now, if that all represents a baseline level of knowedge and sophistication about texts, what can we, as professional scholars, build upon that? If that’s the baseline, what can we do that’s deeper and more comprehensive? But also, what does it say about the growth of culture that a mode of thought that once was the province of an elite has now become routinely available in the population?