'High Culture and Good Literature'

In the arts you often find yourself at events and conferences with speakers and attendees from other disciplines; sometimes history, or language studies, and sometimes it is a discipline like Media.

There has, historically, been a presentation of Media studies as something which is somehow easier or less worthy than the study of history or literature.  It has been designated as the 'soft' option or somehow easier than literary engagement because it related to a field of study which constitutes 'low culture.' 

Despite the fact that I fall within what is arguably one of the most stereotypically 'academic' fields, engaging with the classical English canon of Dickens et al, I whole heartily disagree with the disparagement of media and related fields as somehow constituting 'low' culture. 

Despite the current opinion of the Victorian novel, of Doyle and Dicken's constituting some of the highest forms of cultural exposition, the fact is that few of those who wrote novels that are now considered canonically significant were attempting to write in some effort to create 'high' culture.  They were written for the general public and serialised in papers and magazines for mass consumption.  In much the same way that Shakespeare's plays were of contemporaneous universal appeal, so Dicken's in his own time was 'Mister Popular Sentiment.'  They wrote mysteries, intrigues, thrillers, and bildunsgromen meant for the delectation of the public and their perennial appeal is testimony to the skill of their writers.  In the 1996 film Shakespeare in Love which, although fictional, expressed the opinion of the period when playwrites were considered 'vegrants and peddlers of bombast' - and given the number of bawdy jokes in Shakespeare's plays it is hardly surprising.  

Literature was the 'media' of the past, they are ways of representing the human experience in a way that it accessible to the common man, and so it is perhaps time to re-imagine the definition of the 'canon of literature' as the expression of imaginative culture to a 'canon of human experience' which can encompass the new and adaptive media world in which we now live.  It is a world in which internet fictions and collective story telling are as legitimate a representation of writing talent as anything which is released from a publishing house or where serialised television shows imagine the ideal human future in the way that Star Trek or Doctor Who present man kinds engagement with the universe in the same way that Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World or 1984 expose the hopes and frailties of human kind. 

However, that is not to say that television and film, which constitute the modern equivalent, have no way of entering the modern consciousness in the same manner that Sherlock Holmes, Oliver Twist or even Macbeth have become committed to the annals of history.  If canonicity if based upon the volume of contemporaneous uptake then television shows like Seinfeld, Dallas, and friends will become part of the TV age's cultural legacy; film series like Bat Man, Avatar, and Titanic will represent the theatrical contribution of the digital generation.  I do worry about the future literature classes that will call for historical commentary on a generation which has 50 Shades of Grey and Twilight as top selling literary works but to turn up your nose at the study of the Media and related fields is to prove yourself as short sighted as those who burnt books or banned plays - they are the modern expression of imagination, as new and innovative as plays or 3 volume novels were in their own times. 

While not every play or book ever written is remembered; those which best reflect human experiences have become the canon, we must be careful not to lose a powerful tool of cultural examination, that will be used by future generations, due to our own intellectual snobbery by consigning television, film and games to the cultural scrape heap simply because we do not see their immediate cultural significance.