Alina Layton Head of Faculty – English
Promoting student engagement by balancing the study of canonical literature with popular culture texts in secondary English classrooms Belonging to the canon is a guarantee of quality, and that guarantee of high aesthetic quality serves as a promise, a contract, that announces to the viewer, 'Here is something to be enjoyed as an aesthetic object. Complex, difficult, privileged… You will receive pleasure; at least you're supposed to, and if you don't, well, perhaps there's something off with your apparatus.' (n.d. Landow).
SUNATA
The backdrop of Australian English classrooms is often characterised by debates concerning the supposedly alarmingly low levels of literacy among adolescents as they enter the postschool world, the reasons underpinning the decline in their rates of reading for pleasure, and their perceived disengagement in the classroom. These issues are pitched against the broader backdrop of debates concerning the design of the Australian Curriculum and each State’s Senior Curriculums. Resultingly, there are myriad viewpoints about what students should and should not study in English during their time at school (Merga & Roni 2018, p. 136; Hopwood et al. 2017, p. 46).
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Given the nature of my role and the fact that text selection for our English programs is now governed to a certain extent by the prescribed text lists for Senior English subjects, I thought it timely to examine the often-disparate viewpoints regarding the
incorporation of texts from the Western literary canon and those that fall under the umbrella of popular culture. The opening satirical quip from George P. Landow captures the essence of attitudes towards canonical literature in that if it is not valued by readers, there is something deeply wrong with the receiver (an incredibly unfair assumption!) and, by extension, their taste in popular culture. However, there is a very strong argument in favour of striking a balance between the classic and the popular in order to engage and challenge adolescents. Defining the Western literary canon and popular culture texts Landow’s definition of the Western literary canon posits that it is, ‘an authoritative list, as of the works of an author…which forms a basis for judgment’, (Landow, n.d.). Perhaps the most well-known figure associated with the Western literary canon is the critic Harold Bloom, whose seminal 1994 work – The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages – endeavours to ‘isolate the qualities that made these authors canonical, that is, authoritative in our culture’, (Bloom 1994, p. 2). Literary texts on the list of canonical works are conferred the status of embodying what Bloom terms as ‘sublimity’ and ‘greatness’ (Bloom 1994, p. 2-3). Conversely, texts belonging to the category of popular culture encompass those that belong to ‘everyday life’ or the ‘culture of the people’ such as television, films, video games, multimodal
