36: Popular Culture is Only Useful as a Text for Criticism, by Mark D. Pepper

Kyle Stedman (@kstedman) reads the bad idea "Popular Culture is Only Useful as a Text for Criticism" by Mark D. Pepper (@MarkDPepper). It's a chapter from Bad Ideas about Writing, which was edited by Cheryl E. Ball (@s2ceball) and Drew M. Loewe (@drewloewe). Don't miss the joke: the author of the chapter is disagreeing with the bad idea stated in the chapter's title.

Keywords: affect, cultural studies, fandom, popular culture, taste studies

Mark D. Pepper is an associate professor of English at Utah Valley University where he teaches courses in composition, technical writing, popular culture, and graphic novels. Much of his research deals with how people use and talk about popular culture in their daily lives to create both personal identity and social belonging. His dissertation looked at how the popularity of texts is created and spread in a digital age of blogs, wikis, and social media. His own pop culture fandom started with comic books as a kid and carries on to a Netflix queue full of television series with far too many seasons to ever reasonably catch up on. (2017 bio)

As always, the theme music is "Parade" by nctrnm, and both the book and podcast are licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. The full book was published by the West Virginia University Libraries and Digital Publishing Institute; find it online for free at https://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/badideas.

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