There’s more popular culture than phenomenology in Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture, edited by Michael T. Carroll and Eddie Tafoya, but you have to begin somewhere. So the students and teachers of popular culture will have lots more fun with this collection of essays than their counterparts in philosophy. Philosophy is home to its own pop culture students, but philosophy and phenomenology are not synonymous, neither as ideas nor as communities of thought.

Phenomenology is a fairly rigorous method and approach in philosophy, at least in America. Why it should develop as a tool for the study of popular culture is not obvious. Philosophers trace modern phenomenology to Edmund Husserl, a German mathematician. His work has little direct relevance to popular culture. Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre are three well-known philosophers who were also primarily phenomenologists in their method and vocabulary. Sartre's work is the closest thing to cultural criticism; nevertheless, his straightforward phenomenological work -- his 700-page "essay" on phenomenological ontology, Being and Nothingness, with its review of the then recent history of metaphysics and the logic of internal and external relations going back to Hegel -- is hardly accessible.

But philosophy has often been in the vanguard of culture, whether intellectually, morally, politically, or otherwise, and literary theorists like borrowing from philosophers in order to do some of their own boat-rocking. The introduction to Phenomenological Approaches, by the two editors as well as by Chris Nagel, is a nice overview of popular culture studies and how phenomenology found its way into the cultural critic's tool kit. The editors give a concise and intelligible description of phenomenology in its strictly philosophical aspects, hitting main points of "bracketing," consciousness, meaning, and perception.

Less successful is the justification for the groupings of essays under the headings "Textuality," "Performativity," "Spectatorship," and "The Social Construction of Reality." The phrases are more familiar to cultural critics than to philosophers, which is fine, since the aim of the book is to present applications of phenomenology to cultural studies. But why those particular categories should be identified as scenes of relevant application is never spelled out, at least not in terms of the main elements of phenomenology discussed in the introduction.

The essays themselves are far-ranging and heterogeneous in length, subject matter, style, and relevance to phenomenology. Janice Radway's essay "Phenomenology, Linguistics, and Popular Literature" presents a useful distinction between "elite" and "popular" literature based on a continuum of the text's adherence to various conventions. It is unclear, though, what aspect of the phenomenological method Radway is employing. In fact, she says in the first sentence, "I do not imply that what follows is a strict phenomenological analysis of the popular text" (21). Her essay functions rather as a closer look at phenomenological categories themselves -- with specific reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty -- and is an extension of the editor's introductory essay.

Daniel MacKay's essay "Toward a Phenomenology of the Role-Playing Game Performance," on the other hand, is clearly a phenomenological analysis of popular culture. MacKay premises his analysis on that aspect of phenomenology that the editors describe as "a way to investigate the social construction of the meaning of cultural artifacts, discovering rather than presuming their significance. The values of cultural artifacts can be revealed where they lie, in the constituted artifacts themselves" (8-9). This is phenomenology's "bracketing" at work, with the subsequent perceiving of "the essential structures of things" (9). Harris Berger's essay "The Practice of Perception: Multi-Functionality and Time in the Musical Experiences of a Heavy Metal Drummer," is another good example of the same application of phenomenology.

Many of the other essays either get bogged down in jargon -- usually the jargon of pop cultural analysis rather than that of phenomenology -- or too loosely and sparingly use phenomenological methods to offer good examples of the book's project. On the point of jargon: this is a classroom text and not for the casual reader; only students and teachers will get much out of this collection. With some discretion, it could benefit both the philosophy student needing a taste of philosophy at work in critical studies, and the literature student a taste of some rigorous philosophical analysis of popular culture. But discretion is the key; just throwing the whole book at such students is more likely to frustrate than to stimulate.