Krisany Blount
Even before I was an English major, I found myself dissecting texts. Because I’m a young person – trapped somewhere in the mystery zone between Millennial and Gen Z – the texts I was analyzing were almost always from pop culture. From adaptations of Greek myths to yet another superhero movie, none of my favorites were safe. There was always some little detail to interrogate, a plot point to ponder, a single line to unpack layers of meaning from. This propensity has made me a better writer, but it has also confused some people who can’t understand why I want to pick apart the media I love. Why do I have to read so far into everything? It’s only entertainment, after all.
“For me, analyzing media is my way of telling it “I love you.” Taking it apart is like saying “I want to spend more time with you.” Close reading says “I want to know everything about you.””
For me, analyzing media is my way of telling it “I love you.” Taking it apart is like saying “I want to spend more time with you.” Close reading says “I want to know everything about you.”
Critical engagement tends to be viewed as something only academics do or are qualified to do. The thought is that you need to have a formal education and a fancy degree in something like film studies in order for your thoughts and observations to have merit. This is, of course, false. Though learning critical theory from a class will certainly make engagement easier, anyone, regardless of age or academic background, is capable of analysis.
And I think everyone should be able to engage critically with their favorite media. All art has a message. Critical theory helps us evaluate what a piece is saying and how well it’s saying it. Since interacting with media is unavoidable, critical theory is then another tool of media literacy.
But how can you get better at engaging critically with the media you consume? Reading is an obvious answer. This is why Dr. Bob Nowlan of the UW-Eau Claire English department is currently writing two books that will provide a starting point for understanding critical theory and its applications to popular culture. The first, 21st Century British TV Crime Drama: a Critical Guide, will utilize British TV crime dramas to provide an introduction to key concepts and practices in the fields of Critical Media Studies, Critical Studies in Film, Television, and Moving-Image Culture, and Critical Studies in Popular Culture. The second, Ian Curtis, Joy Division, and Critical Theory, aims to show similarities in the issues and questions tackled by both critical theorists and the band Joy Division.
I recently had the pleasure of chatting with him about the importance of learning critical theory, the intersections of pop culture, critical theory, and memoir, and what we can gain from critical interactions with pop culture.
Krisany Blount: You’re currently writing a book about British TV crime drama and another about Ian Curtis and his band Joy Division, both with an emphasis on critical theory. What attracted you to these topics in particular?
Bob Nowlan: I first encountered the music of Joy Division during my freshman year, 1979-1980, at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. At the time I identified strongly with punk, from the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. I even was proud to be told, as a freshman university student, that I looked like Johnny Rotten, and later deliberately sought to make myself look even more like him. Listening to Joy Division, I heard the same freshness, urgency, and intensity that attracted me to punk, yet also something transcending the immediacy and directness of punk, conveying, in contrast, a richly resonant sense of both distance and precision, a controlled fury emanating from a fiercely passionate yet also agonizingly vulnerable exploration of emotional, psychological, physical, and metaphysical extremes. I have continued to listen regularly to Joy Division and to explore everything I possibly could in any way connected with Ian Curtis and Joy Division ever since, including via multiple extended visits to and extensive ‘field research’ conducted in Manchester and Greater Manchester, England.
“This music connects powerfully with issues, and experiences, of deep personal impact and concern for me–issues and experiences that have proven definitively shaping, even in many respects ‘shatteringly’ shaping, of whom I am and what I am about.”
This music connects powerfully with issues, and experiences, of deep personal impact and concern for me–issues and experiences that have proven definitively shaping, even in many respects ‘shatteringly’ shaping, of whom I am and what I am about. I find this particular life-story and this particular body of music together provide a fantastic avenue to explore and engage a striking intersection of interests between critical theory and popular culture, especially in relation to questions of ultimate and fundamental concern as well as those that traverse conventional boundaries between the sociological and the psychological. I experience a strong personal resonance with what might well be identified as a ‘post-punk sensibility’ and to my mind Joy Division is without a doubt the all-time greatest post-punk band and Ian Curtis is without a doubt the all-time greatest post-punk musician. Although I do love many, many more post-punk bands and musicians, including many contemporary outfits, such as, for example, The Twilight Sad and Fontaines D.C.! In my book I approach the music of Ian Curtis and Joy Division as art, arguing this art encompasses a range of potential meanings and impacts far exceeding, and far superseding, common biographical connections, as understandably fascinating as so many people continue to find those to be–and I am striving to show how this music, as art, can be put to work in ways few have yet even anticipated or imagined, for all the popular attention and acclaim Ian Curtis and Joy Division have posthumously received.
With 21st century British TV crime drama, I love these kinds of shows and watch them again and again, all the time, whenever I get the chance, and have done so for a great many years now. I maintain an immense passion for British crime fiction–as literature, film, and television. I love crime fiction, yet I abhor violence; I am really a quite gentle person; and I am, and long have been, fiercely committed toward working actively on behalf of social justice. Then again, I share those tendencies, qualities, and commitments with many leading crime novelists as well as with many if not most leading creators of crime fiction movies and TV series. My interest in 21st century British TV crime drama also undoubtedly connects with my even longer-running passionate interest in film noir, and noir fiction more broadly conceived, and with my personal affinity and attraction to what might well be identified as a noir sensibility and a noir aesthetics. Crime fiction, including crime television, has long provided a pivotal site for symbolically staging, confronting, and striving to find ways to work through significant social as well as individual trauma. Crime fiction simultaneously engages matters of fundamental philosophical concern, including relations between being and nothingness; the meaning, value, and significance of existence, including at its most intense and extreme; the multiplicity, division, and even fracturing of (personal and social) identity; the complications involved in determining what is ethical as well as how to lead an ethical life; and the boundaries distinguishing, as well as the inextricable interconnection that ultimately links, life and death. I am focused in this book on shows that I can put to work as sites through which to inquire into these kinds of issues, and into many more narrowly specifically socially and politically topical issues, while also showing readers how multiple divergent critical readings of the same show can be simultaneously viable and plausible, especially by reading each show first as aligned with dominant ideology and second as aligned with critique of dominant ideology.
The two books focus on considerably overlapping territory. One key source of unity between the two is my emphasis on critical theory and my drawing upon my personal history of teaching and working with critical theory. From my first encounter with critical theory as an undergraduate student I became enthused and impassioned about pursuing and contributing to further knowledge in critical theory. I have, from this beginning point onward, found critical theory, for all its initial overtly seeming abstractness, to be ultimately highly concrete, relevant, and indeed urgent, and in all my teaching and scholarship concerned with critical theory I continually strive to show this to be the case. I understand critical theory as ultimately continuous with all of the various theories and modes of criticism we all work with all the time, every day, and I find it offers its potentially most compelling contributions to understanding and practice when brought to bear in relation to popular culture, which includes culture that most of us spend a vast amount of our lives involved with, in multiple disparate ways. I have been concentrating my intellectual work in critical theory and critical studies in popular culture ever since graduate school, and in my two books I am attempting to share with a much wider audience what I have shared with many classes of students I have taught in these same areas–to show how critical theory can be concrete, relevant, and urgent.
KB: You’ve taught ten classes on these topics since 2011. How have those experiences effected your conceptualization for these books?
BN: These series of five successive classes, and the students involved in all of these classes, inspired me to write these books. I needed to work hard to be well prepared to teach these classes, and to continue to develop and refine my approaches to doing so, from one class offering to the next, but I learned, as I always do, immensely, from and with my students. The fact students found these subjects exciting of interest, and that they worked to produce exceptional quality work as a result of us taking on these subjects together, demonstrated to me how much these particular focuses have to offer, of interest and value, to a great many people, including many who would not have imagined this to be the case until they began to pursue these paths of inquiry. The sheer fact as well that teaching classes with each of these two focuses repeatedly, while continuing to develop and refine the two focuses from one iteration to the next, has only increased my interest in the subject matter, rather than leaving me tired of it, further emphasizes, for me, that these two books are endeavors I need to pursue–and to accomplish. Ever increasingly I have come to recognize, as I write, that these two books, taken together, allow me to reflect on, examine, and set forth my positions concerning everything that has proven most interesting and important to me throughout my academic career, and, even more than that, my entire life-experience. I have thrown myself into teaching for 35 years, and I’m showing here, in my writing of these two books, what such a total immersion can teach a teacher. I would never be doing this work without having taught these classes, and these students. I am tremendously grateful to them–all of them.
KB: With both books, you seem to be offering an explanation and an example of how critical theory doesn’t have to be restricted to “academic” topics and circles, and in fact shouldn’t be. What do you think critical engagement with popular culture can teach us about ourselves and our society? In other words, what can we gain from critically engaging with popular culture?
BN: Critical engagement with popular culture is, simply put, thoughtfully appreciative engagement. Critical theory provides us numerous concepts, methods, approaches, frameworks, and yet more besides that can help us better understand ourselves, people like and different from us, and the cultures as well as the society of which we are a part–and this enhanced understanding can enable us to make more conscious, deliberate, active, extensive, intensive, and impactful contributions to our lives, the lives of the people with whom we routinely interact, and the lives of our communities. Critical engagement with popular culture can help us come to grips with not only how popular culture forms and constitutes us, but also how we do the same with popular culture.
“Critical engagement enables us to recognize popular culture as site and stake of conversation, contestation, negotiation, transaction, conflict, and struggle, and to find our place and our role within all of this by figuring out what, when, where, how and why we want to contribute. ”
Critical engagement enables us to recognize popular culture as site and stake of conversation, contestation, negotiation, transaction, conflict, and struggle, and to find our place and our role within all of this by figuring out what, when, where, how and why we want to contribute. Critical engagement with popular culture shows us that we are every bit as much concerned with the kinds of issues that celebrated philosophers and critical theorists write about, but we make use of often considerably different signs, codes, and discourses to do so. Much of what we are concerned with, individually and collectively, is largely unconscious, or at least difficult to identify, explain, and figure out how best to which to respond, but thinking critically about how texts of popular culture address the exact same concerns that matter to and motivate us can enable us to clarify our own thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and actions, while also offering us crucial epiphanies–moments of profound discovery, revelation, and insight.
KB: In the profile for Ian Curtis, Joy Division, and Critical Theory, you mention that you are writing it in part as a personal memoir. Do you have any thoughts on combining creative forms of writing with more academic ones? Is one part easier to write than the other?
BN: This is my first attempt at writing a memoir–even at writing a ‘part memoir’. I have found it easier, once I got started, than I expected. I think you need to be at the right place, and the right time, in your life, where you are ready to recall and examine your life-experience, including what has most significantly shaped and impacted this, as well as how that shaping and that impact has made you whom and what you are. You have to be ready for honesty and vulnerability. Since, in my own teaching, I frequently use examples drawn from personal experience, including many stories from personal experience, this is a process that is hardly unfamiliar to me. And, since I’m always seeking ways to show students that critical theory and critical studies of popular culture are highly concrete, relevant, and urgent fields, I find it important to make those kinds of connections all the time, and to make them as blunt and telling as well as colorful and distinctive as I can, while encouraging students to make the same kinds of connections with their own identities and experiences. Also, since I am writing both books with audiences much like students I have taught in mind as my targets it is not hard to combine the academic with the personal, since I have plenty of experience doing exactly that for exactly those kinds of audiences.
KB: Though I can multitask pretty much anything else, I’ve found my best writing is typically the result of focusing on one piece until a draft is done. How are you balancing writing two books at the same time?
BN: Well, it is certainly ambitious, and I am steadily discovering how much so as I proceed. But I have to credit now retired former UW-Eau Claire Director of the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs Karen Havholm for encouraging me to work on both books simultaneously, as she suggested this way I can always move back and forth between the two whenever I run into a block or experience fatigue writing, and working, in one direction. In practice, I do work on one piece at a time, and work that all the way through, but having both projects in process simultaneously, as they deal with many of the same issues and concerns, but one is focused on television and the other on music, does help keep my enthusiasm persistently strong. I have been doing well; since August 1, 2020 I have written 450+ single-spaced typed pages of material, and I have read and taken notes on more books and articles than I could possibly estimate, while doing a huge amount of screening and listening too. I’ve been enjoying it, even as it has proven fairly all-consuming.