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ROCCO CAPOZZI An Interview with Leslie A. Fiedler: Let's Revisit Postmodernism RC In the spring of 1968 I was one of the graduate students at the SUNY at Buffalo who was relatively surprised to hear from you that students should go home and watch 'soap operas' and other popular TV shows, in order to study the new modern 'myths' offered by the 'mass media' (needless to say many of your colleagues were also shocked). Can you revisit those days for us and, with hindsight, talk about both your overall expectations in proposing new approaches to looking at literature and at culture in general? LF I have, from the start of my career as a published writer (I began relatively late in life, my first book not appearing until I was nearly forty), been trying to repair the cultural damage done by the rise of Modernism and the domination of High Culture by the academy: the splitting of the audience for song and story into hostile camps. I have been doing this in the classroom and from the lecture platform as well as in print - 'boring from within: as it were; which is to say, operating from inside the university community and the elitist critical establishment . I have never, of course, despised the masterworks of recent High Literature, much less the classics canonized in the curriculum of classes in literature. Instead, I have tried to reread such authors as Joyce and Shakespeare in the context of popular culture, pointing out their indebtedness to the despised popular genres of their time. Simultaneously , I have attempted to reread writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Margaret Mitchell, and Stephen King not as symptoms of the decay of taste or the tyranny of the marketplace, but as works of art in their own right. To do so, I have had, on the one hand, to work out new classroom strategies - teaching books from both sides of the great divide in the same courses, rather than segregating them in ghettoized ones. I have, on the other, found it necessary to reinvent the language of criticism by finding a non-hermetic, non-pedantic vocabulary for evaluation and analysis understandable to the widest possible audience. I have, therefore, sought to avoid formalism of all kinds, from the New Criticism to Deconstruction, since these inevitably lead their practitioners to translate what they have to say into a code penetrable only by a UN1VER51TY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 60, NUMBER 3. SPRING 1991 332 ROCCO CAPOZZI chosen few. I have not, I must confess, been completely successful in becoming either a pop pedagogue or a pop critic - but at least I have tried. RC 'Cross the Border - Close the Gap' is undoubtedly the essay that best summarizes your proposals to eliminate the 'great divide' between the academidelitist literature and mass culture. However, thirty years later academia still snubs mass culture, and the masses are not rushing to libraries and bookstores to read Dante, Milton, Joyce, Kafka, Becket, etc! Do you still feel that one way to 'close the gap' is for professors to know what students are reading and watching and thus to incorporate in class lectures examples from the so-called official literature with examples of characters, techniques, and language from TV, comic books, movies, etc - let's say examples from 'Columbo: 'Star Trek: Woody Allen, Fellini, Spielberg, Batman, Roger Rabbit, Indiana Jones, etc? Many professors do not agree that this is a good way to make the great classics relevant to our students, fearing that in fact this may be a way of lowering our standards. In a recent international symposium in Italy, I had a chance to recall the important role of Fiedler in the early phase of American Literary postmodernism. My position has always been that you were among the first who saw the importance of the rising role of mass media in the American avant-garde phenomenon called 'postmodernism.' I also feel that you were giving in your own wayan answer to Marshall McLuhan, who was shouting across the Canadian border at the 'poor bastards of the written word' - reminding people of the end of the 'Gutenberg Galaxy.' Did you see yourself as a pioneer...

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