From Beowulf to Britney
![[Image]](images/beowulf1.jpg)
Dennis Hall blames it on The Happy Hooker.
It was the early '70s and Hall was following the typical career path of a young assistant professor of English, teaching classic 18th century fiction.
When the zesty, explicit autobiography of New York madam Xaviera Hollander became a publishing smash in 1971, Hall couldn't resist.
"I was reading it and thinking, 'This is just a new version of Moll Flanders,' " Hall says, citing Daniel Defoe's classic 18th century novel about a woman resorting to theft and prostitution to survive poverty and English social hypocrisy.
At a scholarly meeting, Hall says he presented a paper explaining why he thought The Happy Hooker was effective as literature and social commentary.
"Like Moll Flanders, The Happy Hooker presented one possible way for women to survive in a hostile environment," Hall says. "The book came out just as the women's movement was reemerging. Unlike most pornographic material, which is bought by men, the book sold well to both women and men."
Hall, today a U of L English professor, still teaches composition and classic literature, but his scholarship reflects a wide-ranging interest in pop culture. He has written scholarly papers on subjects as diverse as Civil War reenactors, AIDS jokes, pornography and the appeal of TV's Antiques Roadshow.
His largest work to date is The Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture, a hefty four-volume, 2,368-page compendium published in October 2002 by the Greenwood Press. Hall is the book's co-editor with his long-time pop culture research colleague Thomas Inge, a humanities professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va.
According to Hall, the guide was Greenwood's best-selling book in November 2002. Retailing for $400, the guide is sold primarily to libraries but is written with the layperson in mind.
"These are not essays for experts," Hall says. "They are for you and me—people who don't know squat about magic or museums or stamp collecting."
Written by dozens of academic experts, the guide's 58 essays cover everything from do-it-yourself home repair and editorial cartoons to pulp fiction, sports and photography. Hall and Inge spent more than two years editing the guide as well as writing entries.
The guide combines and updates the contents of two previous Greenwood-published tomes from the 1980s, The Handbook of American Popular Literature and The Handbook of American Popular Culture.
"Pop culture is evolving so rapidly it is hard to keep up to date," Hall says.
The guide's entries on fashion and television had to be updated substantially to include new trends. New chapters were added on amusement parks, home improvement, New Age movements and others.
Hall says that not so long ago there was no market or scholarly interest for a pop culture overview book such as The Greenwood Guide.
"Back in the '70s when I started writing and making presentations on popular culture, I was doing it when it wasn't considered legit; when it didn't count when it was time to award tenure," Hall says.
Hall's published essays often broach provocative topics—with titles that are equally playful.
His 1984 article in the Journal of Popular Culture about the importance of Christmas to the success of Playboy magazine ("The Venereal Confronts the Venerable: Playboy on Christmas") is a typical example.
"Christmas has a long history of emboldening transgressive behavior; people bend the rules during holidays," Hall says. Playboy needed middle-class legitimacy and it became permissible to buy it at Christmas time."
Such articles no longer raise eyebrows in today's universities, where almost every institution offers an eclectic selection of pop culture courses, Hall says.
"Attitudes changed in the mid '80s," Hall says. "It became important to study popular art and culture to understand culture as a whole. Almost every university press now has a popular culture line."
Still, Hall considers himself to be on the "oddball edge."
His recent article topics include gag gifts, backyard gardening as self-realization ritual and the popularity of Jane Austen.
New York's Newsday in June 2003 published Hall's reflections on the leopard-skin motif ("Speaking Through Spots") in design and fashion.
In the article Hall writes: "Early in the 21st century, expression through fashion remains an important way to satisfy people's desire to experience freedom and exercise some control over life. Leopard print allows us to engage nature without abandoning culture."
The article expresses one of the most common ideas in Hall's work, he says.
"One of the main themes I'm interested in is consumer culture and patterns of consumption—what it all means and how reflective it is of culture.
"When I see an emerging fashion trend, for instance, I ask, 'Why is this popular, and what does it say about the wearers?'"
Hall recently wrote a paper on the popularity of bare-midriff fashions among young women and girls in apparent imitation of the pop singer Britney Spears.
In the paper Hall concludes: "Britney and the people who wear the bare midriff uniform want it both ways, naughty and nice. Postmodern culture has either doomed or privileged them to play in the ground between innocence and experience."
Because pop culture has been considered by some as a "soft" subject of scholarship compared to the "hard" sciences, scholars must be especially careful to maintain high scholarly standards, Hall says.
"I teach my students that they have to separate their own plane of experience from their analysis.
"I still teach Beowulf and Shakespeare, but it's also important to try to understand why Hustler is popular and what it says about our society."
