Chasing the Popular Arts Through the Critical Forest

Abstract

Since the days of the dime novel, critics have assailed the popular arts for their supposed effects on American morality and sensibility. In 1954 Frederic Wertham touched some familiar bases in a book bearing the titillating title Seduction of the Innocent. In it Wertham decried the "chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction by comic books, both their content and their alluring advertisements of knives and guns, [as] contributing factors to many children's maladjustments."' The pernicious maladjustments noted by Wertham are violence, sadism, cruelty and the "Superman philosophy," which manifests itself in male characters who act as saviors of the common folk, rescuing them from "foreign-looking men," as well as in superwomen who are always horror types. He criticized the dominant formulae of comics and called for a drastic revision of those requiring the hero to act like a criminal and the criminal to go out like a hero.2Today we realize that critical approaches to the popular arts cast little light on the workings of popular culture in America if they begin with the premise that Americans are innocent until seduced by the products of their own culture. Such a n approach is partially grounded on a failure to understand culture in its relationship to myth. To explore this relationship we need to build a critical vocabulary and apply it to various popular arts. In so doing we can demonstrate the utility of such an approach and suggest some of its advantages for popular culture study.The words culture and symbol are surrounded by clouds of assumptions that critics of the popular arts so far have failed to disperse. Culture limits and organizes human experiences. It does SO by providing a version of reality that guarantees the shared meanings necessary for social existence. The basis of this version of reality is the culture's symbols. Symbols are at the core of the communicative process, and a culture is a n information network in which popular arts function as primary information processors. The word symboling denotes the process of giving things meanings; it includes as well the grasping of those meanings. Because words are not a culture's only symbols-there are languages of body movement and the visual arts, for example-a culture can include an enormous range of human experience: ideas and attitudes, behavior, art forms and artifacts.3The ethos, or spirit of a culture, is the forgotten, unconscious key to values and behavior, and ultimately, to artifacts. It is the unarticulated 412

Constructing the Military Hero

“…In addition to these gendered differences, scholars diverge on other dimensions of the hero's story. For Campbell (1949), the hero is an archetype, a timeless and universal story that enjoys a cross-cultural validity (see Wahlstrom and Deming 1980). Others see the hero as a culturally specific figure.…”