בין "ארכאיזציה" ל"עִִכִִשוּו": על השימוש בתרבות פופולרית בשיעורי הספרות

Bringing popular culture to literature classes is a widespread phenomenon, intended to make ancient and challenging texts more accessible. However, as researchers, teachers, and librarians have shown, this has potentially controversial implications. The following paper asks: Why is approaching the literary text through a popular artwork potentially problematic? Do we still have pedagogical means at our disposal to overcome the inherent “otherness” of this text through its contemporary adaptation, and if so, what are they? The paper discusses through two examples the implications that can be attributed to the integration of popular art in literature classrooms. To this end, it uses the contextual and comparative perspective accepted in “classical reception studies”, and the study of “literary communication” and the affinities between literary sources and their translations and adaptations. It also adopts the distinction accepted among folklorists between “folklore” and “popular culture”, and that accepted among cultural memory scholars—between “archaization” and “contemporanization” as a criterion for assessing the artistic response. Against this background, it argues that an interesting, stimulating and moving adaptation is one that embodies a rich and fruitful theme in the text, which is characterized by gaps and questions that the reader is required to bridge through his imagination, and by a creative dimension or genre that enlivens the dialogue between the present and the past through the use of a variety of means of expression.