Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509050071
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times|
DATELINE: OXFORD, MISS. LENGTH: Long
Was the blue-eyed, hip-swiveling crooner more rooted in gospel or country? Was the poor boy from Tupelo consciously turning the world on its head when he strummed his guitar and twitched his leg - or just doing what felt good at the time? Were his 31 feature films mere schlock or veiled political commentary?
These were among many questions considered last month at the University of Mississippi's first International Conference on Elvis Presley, an unusual gathering that was intended, said one of its organizers, to leave more traditional scholars ``all shook up.''
For this was no ordinary gathering of eggheads. In addition to the usual fare - scholarly papers, read aloud - the conference, formally titled ``In Search of Elvis: Music, Race, Religion, Art, Performance,'' offered the testimony of Elvis impersonators, Elvis-inspired artists, Elvis collectors and Elvis' relatives.
Over six days and nights, as scholars probed Elvis' impact on civil rights and the sexual revolution, there was plenty of room left for levity. El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, sang ``You Ain't Nothing But a Chihuahua.'' Gene Smith, Elvis' cousin, told about a pie fight they once had at the posh Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif.
And often, there was meaning in the minutiae. When one scholar exhibited a vial of Elvis' sweat (``Let his perspiration be an inspiration,'' the label read), he proved a point about the power of mass marketing. When another compared Elvis to Jesus, nobody argued - after all, who else in U.S. history attracted so many more fans after death than in life?
Taken as a whole, the conference was the latest salvo in a national battle about the nature of scholarship. On campuses across the nation, as humanities professors have begun to teach about everything from soap operas to Tupperware, the very definition of a liberal arts education is up for debate.
Should American popular culture - long the fodder of sociologists - now be included in the teaching of literature, history or art? Those who say yes argue that such a change signals a ``democratization'' of knowledge, a welcome departure from elitist traditions. But those who say no - and there are many who do - lament that higher education is becoming hopelessly trivialized.
Hilton Kramer, the editor of the neoconservative magazine The New Criterion, has called the increasing presence of popular culture in the classroom a ``spirit-destroying menace to the life of the mind itself.''
``Students arrive on college campuses already besotted with the trash of popular culture,'' he wrote in one essay, ``and it must now be one of the goals of a sound liberal education to wean them away from it.''
John M. Ellis, a founding member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, a Southern California-based professional society formed in opposition to what it deems faddish scholarship, agrees.
``The academic world seems to have lost completely any ability to distinguish between foolish pedantry and material with serious content,'' said Ellis, a professor of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. ``If we start filling our curricula with Elvis, then there will be less time for writers like Shakespeare. ... Some phenomena are more important than others.''
But how to judge importance? And who gets to decide?
When Bill Ferris, one of the organizers of the Elvis conference, first became director of the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture in 1979, several people told him that the term ``southern culture'' was an oxymoron.
That didn't stop Ferris, a native Mississippian who, as a folklore professor at Yale University, had already made a documentary about a farmer who taught his pigs to pray. Ferris joined with his new colleagues at Ole Miss to create a unique degree program in Southern studies.
They instituted the world's largest blues music archives. They took advantage of their location in Oxford, the tiny Mississippi town that author William Faulkner called home, to create an annual Faulkner conference that draws scholars from all over the world. They compiled a 1,643-page Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, with entries on everything from Good Ole Boys to Goo-Goo Clusters, that won widespread acclaim.
A conference on Elvis, who died 18 years ago, seemed like the next logical step, Ferris said - another bold attempt to stretch the traditional boundaries of what it matters to know. But as he and English professor Vernon Chadwick began planning the conference, they encountered immediate skepticism right in their own back yard.
The mayor of Oxford, John Leslie, vetoed the City Council's decision to provide $7,000 in civic funding to the conference. ``It's just not a very academic thing,'' he was quoted as saying.
In time, the City Council overruled Leslie and the funding was restored. But the mayor's assessment of what some were beginning to call Elvisian scholarship would soon be echoed by critics across the country.
``They said, `What are you gonna do? Sit around and examine the lyrics to ``Blue Suede Shoes''?''' Chadwick said of the naysayers, a group he calls ``the scholar police.'' ``The whole subject of the Elvis conference exposed prejudices deep-seated in higher education.''
Chadwick, who last year taught a course that compares Melville's Polynesian novels to Elvis' Hawaiian movies, contends that the conference was particularly upsetting to traditional scholars because Elvis was a redneck: rural, Southern and (initially) dirt poor.
``To come to an Elvis conference would be to not only declare an academic interest in Elvis but to also become associated with the working class, perhaps illiterate, socially gauche,'' he said. ``Academic interest is not necessarily objective and neutral, but is class- and race-based.''
If his fellow scholars could only get over their snootiness, Chadwick said, they would see that Elvis is not only worthy of study, but is a window through which to view the works of other great artists more clearly.
``Melville is a symbol of American high culture and his novel `Moby Dick' is considered the classic work of American literature. But he benefited from being paired with Elvis Presley because my students actually took an interest in him for the first time,'' Chadwick said, referring to his class, which students nicknamed ``Melvis.''
``I didn't authenticate Elvis in the name of Melville,'' Chadwick continued. ``I made Melville relevant in the name of Elvis.''
by CNB