John provided some of the intellectual cornerstones of the academic study of popular culture. He stressed the concept of formula in the study of popular genres, highlighting the distinctions between formula and form and between convention and invention. He referred to genre as a collective dream.
I consider these popular formulas to be of more complex artistic and cultural interest than most previous commentators have indicated. To substantiate this general thesis, I have chosen to deal rather intensively with a few major formulas - various forms of detective and crime stories, the western, and the best-selling social melodrama. I have not attempted to present an overall account of popular formulas or genres - the reader will quickly note such obvious omissions as all types of comedy and romance, the horror story, science-fiction, and many other important areas of popular narrative and drama. [...] Instead, the organizing principle of this book is theoretical: I have tried to define the major analytical problems that confront us when we seek to inquire more fully into the nature and significance of formulaic literature [...]. Thus, I hope the book will combine some of the advantages of generality and particularity. It develops a general methodology that can, I believe, be profitably applied to popular formulas other than those treated in this book. (2)
Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture John G. Cawelti
Nor is this to suggest that he has been a stranger to canonical writing. James Fenimore Cooper, Melville, Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov and Bellow have long been among the favorites in his teaching and criticism. But popular culture has been his forte, everyday, plural America in its exultations and anxieties refracted in what he once characterized as "magic pigments of adventure, romance, and mystery." In this, and since the late 1950s when he first made his scholarly bow, he has served as a pioneer theorist and analyst, an American Studies voice (though with frequent delvings into British and European work) as keen-edged as it has been comprehensive. 2ff7e9595c
Kommentare