Abstract
One of the more exciting aspects of academicpostmodernism has been the attention it has generatedin popular culture. With the dissolution of whatAndreas Hu yssen called “the great divide” betweenelite and popular culture, the image of professors ashigh-brow arbiters of decorum and taste is now oftenreplaced with another, equally reductive perception:the professor as carnival barker, enthusiastically lead-ing young minds away from the cultural center andtowards a sideshow of debased or alien social ele-ments. As theorists of popular culture, we shamelesslycast our gaze on cultural productions that once were“beneath us,” recognizing pornography, working-classliterature, B-movies, pulp fiction, and soap operas asrelevant objects of scrutiny. If, as Huyssen asserted inAfter the Great Divide, modernism constituted itselfthrough a conscious strategy of exclusion, “an anxietyof contamination by its Other: an increasingly con-suming and engulfing mass culture,” then we mightsay that postmodernism delights in this “contamina-tion” (1). It marks the historical moment when acade-mics climb down from the ivory tower and join thecarnival in the streets.