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California Polytechnic State University
Department of English
Humanities Program

Dick Simon

Office 47-34E
Phone 756 2475
E mail: rsimon@calpoly.edu

THE STUDY OF POPULAR CULTURE
Click here for Humanities 320 Values, Media, Culture

ACADEMIC BIOGRAPHY: Dick Simon grew up in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, was educated in the public schools there, and graduated with a BA and MA from the University of Michigan. He taught humanities at Northern Michigan and Western Michigan Universities, earned a Ph.D in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University (1977), and taught at the University of California, San Diego, and at the University of Texas at Austin before joining the Cal Poly faculty in 1988. He is currently a professor in the English Department and the director of the Humanities Program. His teaching interests include great books and modern novels, 18th and 20th century British & American literature, popular culture, and the movies (see Humanties 320: Values, Media and Culture.) In 1996, he won the Cal Poly Distinguished Teaching Award. Dick. Simon is the author of two books: Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1999) and The Labyrinth of the Comic: Theory and Practice from Fielding to Freud (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), as well as a number of scholarly articles (on Sigmund Freud, Samuel Beckett, E.M. Forster , Joseph Conrad, Nathanael West, John Kennedy Toole, advertising, tabloid newspapers, and shopping malls.) Go to the VITA button to the left of this page to see his full academic biography.

 

Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: the University of California Press, 1999) is available in hardback and paperback.You can locate it at local bookstores and at web site bookstores as well as the web site of the University of California Press: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8478.html TRASH CULTURE has been TRANSLATED INTO CHINESE and has been PUBLISHED IN BEIJING. For an image of the cover of the Chinese edition, please click on the BOOKS button to the left of this screen.

TRASH CULTURE

Seinfeld as a contemporary adaptation of Etherege's Restoration comedy of manners The Man of Mode? Friends as a reworking of Shakespeare's romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing? Star Wars as an adaptation of Spenser's epic poem, The Faerie Queene? The popular culture that surrounds us in our daily lives bears a striking similarity to some of the great works of literature of the past. In television, movies, magazines, and advertisements we are exposed to many of the same stories as those critics who study the great books of Western literature, but we have simply been encouraged to look at those stories differently.

In Trash Culture, Richard Keller Simon examines the ways in which the great literature and cultural work of the past has been rewritten for todays consumer society, with supermarket tabloids such as The National Enquirer and celebrity gossip magazines like People serving as contemporary versions of the great dramatic tragedies of the past. Today's advertising repeats the tale of the Golden Age, but inverts the value system of a classic utopia; the shopping mall combines bits and pieces of the great garden styles of Western history, and now adds consumer goods; Playboy magazine revises Castiglione's Renaissance courtesy book, The Book of the Courtier; and Cosmopolitan magazine revises the womens coming-of-age novels of Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Edith Wharton. Trash Culture concludes that the great books are alive and well, but simply hidden from the critics. It argues for the linking of high and low for the study and appreciation of each form of literature, and the importance of teaching popular culture alongside books of the great tradition in order to understand the critical context in which the books appear.

FROM THE CRITICS

"[Simon] invites respect for popular works as artistic expressions in themselves at the same time as he uses these expressions as hooks to better understand-and appreciate-the 'great' works of the past."--Robert J. Thompson, author of Television's Second Golden Age

"Trash Culture is original, provocative, strongly argued and an enjoyable as well as informative read. . . We not only see trash culture anew by reading it from a classical critical perspective, but, more startlingly, we see classical critical perspectives anew in relation to how exactly they apply to trash culture."--Tony Hilfer, author of The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre

FROM THE REVIEWS

From Library Journal

Simon (English and humanities, California Polytechnic State Univ.) here maintains that great literature and popular entertainment evoke "comparable experiences." Painstakingly detailing the structures and ideas shared by popular culture and great literature, he compares modern supermarket tabloid and gossip magazine tragedies to the great tragic literature; TV talk shows, sitcoms, and soap operas to the history of the theater; and Star Wars, Star Trek, and Vietnam War movies to The Faerie Queene, Gulliver's Travels, and Homer. Likewise, advertising, shopping malls, and Playboy, he suggests, fulfill historic needs in modern context. A controversial and optimistic view of both literature and popular works, Simon's argument is carefully thought out and surprisingly convincing. Recommended for literature and communication collections.--Gene Shaw, NYPL Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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