MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

While the COVID-19 pandemic unfortunately ended millions of lives, it also ended the way instructors think about education. The pandemic transformed teaching and learning alike; once, students gathered and learned collectively, until the pandemic shifted this idea into tiny little screens, where students did more sleeping than learning. After being online for three years, students are struggling with caring about coursework. There is a solution to this, though, which this paper proposes. Instructors must engage students in different, more modern perspectives. This paper proposes shifting English classes to bring in pop culture presences to further engage students, using Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a case study to argue that literature is vastly important to contemporary readers, for Dickens sets a precedent for modern works that is still prevalent today. Dickens captures the human condition in his writings by use of stock characters that round out his narrative, building a world so comfortable and lived in that readers are simply immersed. Charles Dickens’s work is still important because his novels teach readers lessons, analyze the human condition, and inspire popular contemporary works. It is easy to dismiss Dickens as a boring classic writer if that is how his work is taught; it is much harder to once his characters are understood as deeply crafted people with motivations that are not unlike the motivations and arcs of famous popular culture characters. While analyzing Dickens’s writing, this paper will also draw in connections between Dickens and Stephen King, the hero of Game of Thrones, Jon Snow, and figures like Batman. Once Dickens is brought into contemporary times, his lessons that he teaches in his novels and the importance of his work will become more interesting to college students.