“What Like It’s Hard?” Representations and Remediations of Academia in Popular Culture
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, popular culture increasingly served as an intermediary to present and, in some cases, reimagine academia and the academy for mass audiences. This mediation results from an assembly of narratives from various media forms and contexts, both by those inside and outside the academy. The result is a vision of the academy in Western popular culture that is exciting and inviting at turns, but is more frequently shark-like, insular, and intimidating.