American Popular Culture Commons^™

Video Game Review — Final Fantasy Xiv: Level Up Forever, Brian Cowlishaw

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Review of the video game Final Fantasy XIV: Level Up Forever.

Graphic Novel Review — The Adventures Of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’Ll Ever Need, Robert G. Weiner

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Review of Daniel H. Pink and Rob Ten Pas's book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, New York: Penguin, 2008.

Experiments In Love: Longus’ Daphnis & Chloe And Henry De Vere Stacpoole’S The Blue Lagoon, L. Kirsten Day

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Despite a chronological gulf of nearly two thousand years, the second century C. E. Greek romance writer Longus and the early twentieth century Irish novelist Henry de Vere Stacpoole were prompted to produce their best works by a similar motive: an urge to explore the world, and particularly the phenomenon of love and desire, from a standpoint of complete innocence. Although the resulting novels, Daphnis & Chloe and The Blue Lagoon respectively, have no evident direct connection, they exhibit surprising similarities not only in plot, setting, and characterization, but also in the values, perspectives, and worldviews they advance. The striking …

Ovid And Mel Gibson: Power, Vulnerability, And What Women Want, Geoff Bakewell

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Knowledge of Ovid is invaluable for analyzing Nancy Meyers’s film What Women Want (2000). Advertising executive Nick Marshall (Mel Gibson) is a sexist, chauvinistic ladies’ man who acquires the ability to hear what women are thinking. He is in effect a second Tiresias, and this article examines him in light of the gender-bending seer from the Metamorphoses. Meyers links Nick’s miraculous transformation to his attempt to listen to women while simultaneously cross-dressing. He subsequently becomes an intermediary between the genders, especially on sexual matters. The article further examines the Nick/Tiresias parallel in light of Ovid’s treatment of other Theban …

The Labyrinth Of Memory: Iphigeneia, Simonides, And Classical Models Of Architecture As Mind In Chris Nolan’S Inception (2010), Benjamin Haller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Chris Nolan’s 2010 film Inception uses architecture as a language whereby to comment upon the relationship of the protagonist, Dom Cobb, with his deceased wife, Mal. This paper argues that three classical models – Homer’s tomb of Myrhine described in the Iliad, Iphigeneia’s dream of the collapse of the house of Agamemnon in Euripides’s Iphigeneia Among the Taurians, and Simonides’ Memory Palace mnemonic technique – manifest parallel uses of architecture as a metaphor for mind.

The film identifies each of its main characters – Dom, Mal, and Ariadne – with different architectures and with different modes of cognition. The …

300 And Fellini-Satyricon: Film Theory In The Tertiary Classroom, Leanne Glass

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Pedagogical practices in Reception-based courses on ancient Greece and Rome in film often focus on an individual film’s connections to its historical themes and meta-narrative. In contrast, courses based on Film Studies often focus pedagogical discourses on filmic techniques or the filmmaking process per se. Regularly, the two approaches remain discrete and discipline-based.

In view of this disjuncture in teaching approaches and foci, the intention of this paper is to explore the benefits of film theory, including its consideration of film technique, within Classical Reception courses. Therefore, the suggestion offered herein is that more emphasis on the pedagogies of Film …

Theseus Loses His Way: Viktor Pelevin’S Helmet Of Horror And The Old Labyrinth For The New World, Alison Traweek

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This article explores the relationship between the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and Viktor Pelevin’s 2006 adaptation of it, The Helmet of Horror, particularly how it can serve as a case study for the nature and significance of adaptation. It examines the idea of memory, a central theme of the novel, and considers how three aspects of the original myth – the Minotaur, Ariadne’s thread, and the labyrinth itself – shape and inform Pelevin’s retelling. Each of these is unique to this myth in antiquity, and together, they structure the story. Each is also fundamentally connected to the …

The Odyssey And Its Odyssey In Contemporary Texts: Re-Visions In Star Trek, The Time Traveler’S Wife, And The Penelopiad, Mary Economou Bailey Green

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Homer’s The Odyssey is the archetypal quest story. The dialogue began with Homer, and contemporary texts and popular culture media have continued the tradition of deconstructing and recreating stories, addressing issues related to the human psyche. As Hardwick and Stray note, the relationship between ancient and modern is “not merely inherited but constantly made and remade,” one that we see in the following varied genres and versions that retell the Odyssean myth, relating re-visions of characters, relationships, structures, and themes. The original Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais” is an allegory of the Odyssean quest for human knowledge, while …

O Homer, Where Art Thou?: Teaching The Iliad And The Odyssey Through Popular Culture, Mallory Young

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Like so many of my academic colleagues, I spend an inordinate amount of time lamenting our students’ lack of engagement, discipline, and preparation. The problems are naturally exacerbated when the subject is literature and the literature in question is, by its nature, far removed in time and place from students’ daily lives. At the same time, requirements to study literature have become compressed, if not eliminated entirely. Ancient Greek works, in particular, seem to pose special problems for unmotivated or unprepared students. As our students become less likely to have a prior context from which to approach ancient texts, the …

Wounds That Will Not Heal: Heroism And Innocence In Shane And The Iliad, Carl A. Rubino

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

George Stevens’ film Shane, which dates from 1953, remains an especially successful version of the heroic paradigm that is established in Homer’s Iliad. Just as Achilles, the hero of Homer’s poem, considers abandoning the war at Troy in favor of a long and uneventful life at home, the film’s mysterious hero makes a futile attempt to abandon his violent past for a “normal life” as an ordinary farmer in the American west. In the end, however, the threatened status of the domestic world Shane is trying to enter makes it impossible for him to renounce his heroic nature and violent …

Guest Editorial: “Καλὸν Ἀνθρωπίνου Βίου Κάτοπτρον”: Popular Culture As A Pedagogical Lens On Greco-Roman Antiquity (Essays In Honor Of Kirsten Day), L. Kirsten Day, Benjamin Haller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Guest editorial for Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2014), Classics and Contemporary Popular Culture.

Editorial: Moving Popular Culture Studies Scholarship Into The Future, Lynnea Chapman King, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Editorial for Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2014), Classics and Contemporary Popular Culture.

On Confronting Identity And Global Challenges Through Popular Culture And Pedagogy [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal Of Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Volume 11, Issue 2 (August 2024)], Tyler Robert Sheldon, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

On Confronting Identity And Global Challenges through Popular Culture and Pedagogy [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 11, Issue 2 (August 2024)]

Editorial

On Confronting Identity and Global Challenges through Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Tyler Robert Sheldon and Anna CohenMiller

Articles

Revisiting Paradise Lost through K-Pop: A Global Approach to Teaching Writing, Nayoung Bishoff

Examining Adolescence and Agency in the Midst of International Crisis: Pandemics, Pandemonium, and Zombie Young Adult Literature, T. Hunter Strickland

Ways of Decoloniality by the Painted Lady: Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Katara Demonstrates How to Revive a Community in Ecological …

Three Characters And Me(Me): Positioning Popular Culture To Unpack Emerging Teacher Identity, Gillian E. Mertens, Henry (Cody) C. Miller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In this article we narrate an instructional practice we implemented in two different teacher education courses that facilitated conversations about teacher identity through the use of fictional characters who were educators. This practice served two purposes in our course work: firstly, this activity presents students with an opportunity to demonstrate their media interests and career goals; secondly, this activity provides a quick, baseline assessment of how aspiring teachers view their profession and future practice. We detail student responses to this activity and consider how their choices of fictional educators fit into broader patterns we see in popular culture, specifically depictions …

Ways Of Decoloniality By The Painted Lady: Avatar: The Last Airbender’S Katara Demonstrates How To Revive A Community In Ecological Distress Brought By The Colonial Expansion Of The Fire Nation, Jose Santos P. Ardivilla

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In the third episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Book 3: The Book Of Fire, the “Gaang” consisting of Avatar Aang, Toph, Sokka, and Katara chanced upon a fishing village on stilts,ravaged by the pollution of its waterways. The pollution comes from the industrial activity of the Colonial Masters’ Fire Nation which greatly affected the village. This animation is from Nickelodeon, a channel geared for children’s entertainment, thus implicates humorous asides in what purports to be a serious epicurean reclaiming of a lost balance through indigenous visual culture, solidarity, media studies, and ecocriticism. Katara disguises herself as …

Examining Adolescence And Agency In The Midst Of International Crisis: Pandemics, Pandemonium, And Zombie Young Adult Literature, T. Hunter Strickland

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-22 brought an abundance of changes to secondary education as students transitioned across the country to virtual and hybrid learning contexts. Teachers flexed quickly and frequently to support the learning that students acquired in these new, digital spaces even as school, district, and state demands on teaching increased. The English/Language Arts classroom pivoted along with others as teachers sought out digital reading and writing resources for students to engage in. In the midst of a national crisis, a metaphorical monster that sought to destroy, much like Beowulf ’s dragon did, adolescent readers, despite the discourses of …

Revisiting Paradise Lost Through K-Pop: A Global Approach To Teaching Writing, Nayoung Bishoff

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The short film series Wings (2016) by the Korean musical group BTS (Beyond the Scene) revisits John Milton’s Paradise Lost. BTS reinterprets Adam and Eve’s leaving of Eden as youths’ self-discovery process, overcoming a binary mindset. BTS emphasizes how experiences—trials, pains, and the struggle of youths to walk out of black-and-white perspectives—turn out to be “all so beautiful” as resources to grow. Wings demonstrates how the themes and elements in Paradise Lost can be used as a tool not only to explore Biblical concepts, but also to understand what pedagogical environments youths need to fully express themselves as writers. …

Editorial: On Confronting Identity And Global Challenges Through Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Tyler Robert Sheldon, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Editorial for Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 11, Issue 2 (August 2024), On Confronting Identity And Global Challenges through Popular Culture And Pedagogy.

On Media Literacy, Power, And Representation [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal Of Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Volume 11, Issue 1 (March 2024)], Barbara Perez, Karina A. Vado, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

On Media Literacy, Power, and Representation [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 11, Issue 1 (March 2024)]

Editorial

Media Literacy, Power, and Representation, Barbara Perez and Karina A. Vado

Articles

Three Years of Misinformation: A Case Study of Information Literacy Methods, Elizabeth Zak

“This is music!”: What Stranger Things’ Eddie Munson Reveals About the Power of Metal. Ashley Butterworth Brumbelow

Gender, Age, Class, and Racial Stereotypes and Power Relations in Television Ads: 2011-13 vs 2021-22. Thomas Clark and Julie Stewart

Art of Inclusion. Catherine R. P. King

The Art Of Inclusion: Theatre’S Contribution To Popular Culture Literacy For Students With Intellectual Disabilities, Catherine R. P. King

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This essay explores the transformative role of theatre in special education, focusing on its capacity to foster social skills and life navigation abilities in students with disabilities. In light of the fundamental importance of these skills for social inclusion and quality of life, the article highlights the innovative and effective approach to integrating theatre into special education classrooms. It discusses how theatre can empower students with disabilities by enhancing their social interaction, communication, and life navigation skills. In addition, the article delves into the intersection of theatre and popular culture, showcasing how theatre can serve as a valuable tool for …