POPULAR CULTURE

Books on Popular Culture, Fashion Culture, Consumer Culture, Culture and Cultural Studies, Books On Cultural Studies

Intellectual opinions of popular culture, the culture of the masses, have been deeply shaped by critical theory.

Since the Frankfurt School, which identified with the ‘high culture’ of the intellectual classes, popular culture has been seen as trivial, demeaning and commercialized, serving the interests of the capitalist system.

Popular culture as we know it came about in the second half of the nineteenth century and was viewed very negatively by those who dared to acknowledge its existence. The idea that "culture" was divisible into different types - high, popular, and folk are the most common distinctions - in the way that society was divisible into classes came primarily from the writings of Matthew Arnold in his book Culture and Anarchy.

Post-modernist theorists, however, no longer accept the belief that there is some objectively superior high culture setting a standard from which to make evaluations of others. They have been more interested in popular culture as representing the voices of the previously silent, and by adopting the methods of film analysis or literary criticism they examine the way popular culture is produced and the underlying assumptions upon which its meaning rests.

The popular culture movement was founded on the principle that the perspectives and experiences of common folk offer compelling insights into the social world. The Journal of Popular Culture continues to break down the barriers between so-called "low" and "high" culture and focuses on filling in the gaps that a neglect of popular culture has left in our understanding of the workings of society. - The Journal of Popular Culture - The official publication of the Popular Culture Association - wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0022-3840

An introduction to theories of popular culture - Strinati, D.- Publisher: Routledge
Abstract: The publication represents a clear and comprehensive guide to the major theories of popular culture, and a critical assessment of the ways in which these theories have tried to understand and evaluate popular culture in modern societies. Among the theories and ideas that the book introduces are: mass culture; the Frankfurt School and the culture industry; structuralism and semiology; Marxism, political economy and ideology; feminism; postmodernism; and cultural populism. The books explains how theorists such as Adorno, Barthes, Althusses and Hebdige have grappled with the many forms of popular culture, from jazz to the Americanization of UK popular culture, from Hollywood cinema to popular television series and soap operas, from teen magazines to the spy novel, and shopping centres. Each chapter includes a guide to key texts for further reading and there is a comprehensive bibliography.

Discourse on popular culture: class, gender and history in the analysis of popular culture.
Shiach, M. - Publisher: Basil Blackwell Ltd.
Abstract: Designed to be of interest to students of communication and cultural studies, literature and literature theory, women's studies and cultural history, the book examines the history of analyses of popular culture in the UK, from the 18th century to the present day. It highlights the ways in which discussions of popular culture have been structured by considerations of power, class and gender and have generally marginalized the cultural contributions of women. Specifically, the focus is on a series of key phases in the history of these discourses during which the nature of popular culture became a crucial issue for theorists situated within the dominant culture. Among the examples discussed are 18th century poetry; penny fiction and the revival of folk music in the 19th century; popular theatre in the early 20th century; and the transformation of discourses on popular culture brought about by the development of broadcasting. It is argued that the cultural and political assumptions underlying the discourses, which concern class and culture, the role of women, authenticity and cultural decline, raise issue which should be critically examined in discussions of popular culture today.

Urban Myths: Popular Culture, the City and Identity
By Katie Milestone, Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University (July 2008)
Abstract: This article uses Manchester (England) as a case study to examine some relationships between the city and the popular culture that emerges from, or seeks to represent, this city. We focus on post-war popular culture that has been widely disseminated such as film, television and popular music. The article considers whether these examples of popular culture reflect wider urban, social and cultural change and discuss what impact this popular culture has had on changing the landscape and fortunes of the city. In particular, we discuss the case study of Manchester's popular culture in terms of ideas about place-based identities and social class. We consider popular culture in terms of de-industrialising Manchester through to regenerated Manchester. The paper concludes by discussing the possibility that the city centre of Manchester has become gentrified and considers the impact that this is having on popular culture.

Gay Sexuality in Singaporean Chinese Popular Culture - Where Have All the Boys Gone?
Kenneth Chan
China Information, Vol. 22, No. 2, 305-329 (2008)
In offering a selective survey of gay sexuality in Singaporean Chinese popular culture, particularly television, film, and theater, this article examines how the notion of the liminal functions as an effective critical trope to engage with a shifting presence/absence materiality of gayness in these representations. It also argues that this presence/absence is a consequence of the concentrically circular hierarchy of cultural production and consumption created by the Singapore media censorship model. The contradictions embedded in censorship practices and gay cultural representations ultimately emerge out of Singapore's desire to present itself as a culturally open and vibrant society in its bid to be part of the global capitalist network, while the country continues to hold onto its archaic antisodomy laws inherited from the British Indian Penal Code.

The symposium on urban popular culture in modern China
by: Min Ma, Jin Jiang, Di Wang, Joseph Esherick, Hanchao Lu
Abstract: The studies of urban popular culture in modern China in recent years have attracted wide attention from scholars in China and abroad. The symposium, which is composed by Ma Min’s “Injecting vitality into the studies of urban cultural history,” Jiang Jin’s “Issues in the studies of urban popular culture in modern China,” Wang Di’s “The microcosm of Chinese cities: The perspective and methodology of studying urban popular culture from the case of teahouses in Chengdu,” Joseph W. Esherick’s “Remaking the Chinese city: Urban space and urban culture” and Lu Hanchao’s “From elites to common people: The downward trend in the studies of Chinese urban history in the United States,” provide valuable insights on the perspective, trend, and methodology of the studies.

Popular Culture and Demystification: Adorno's Argument in the Context of Russian Popular Culture - Hajiyev, Anna
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 94th Annual Convention
Abstract: The essay explores the question if popular culture can function as a demythologizing force in society and focuses on the Russian greatness myth. While I share Adorno’s opinion on the liberating power of art, I argue that some instances of mass culture are negatively capable of unmasking a collective myth. I disagree with the idea that modern mass culture promotes solely regressive and antidemocratic tendencies in society and hope to explicate my point of view by analyzing the Russian comedy series Nasha Russia.

Law and Popular Culture: Examples from Colombian Slang and Spanish-Language Radio in U.S. - Ernesto Hernandez Lopez - Chapman University School of Law
Abstract: This article argues that critical analysis of popular culture themes benefits legal scholarship by providing distinct cross-border perspectives and illuminating popular resistance efforts to hegemonic forces. This examination occurs in an Inter-American context, characterized by a south-north dynamic and migration's transnational influence. In these dynamics, there is significant popular resistance and anti-subordination to hegemonic forces. Legal scholarship often overlooks this by focusing on formal legal texts and processes. This resistance is visible within popular culture, as part of ¿hidden transcripts.¿
This article makes two claims about popular culture's relevance, one methodological/theoretical claim and one substantive claim. First, observing how popular culture reflects societal interpretations of the law and politics greatly benefits the scholarly objectives of international research by promoting an exchange across national borders with an appreciation for different perspectives. Second, critically exploring popular culture illuminates how resistance and anti-subordination efforts often exercised by popular sectors, civil society, or Southern countries may be represented in this culture. As evidence of this, Colombian slang and Spanish radio in the U.S during 2006 immigration demonstrations are examined as two popular culture examples. This article incorporates theoretical innovations from law and popular culture scholarship, Latin American cultural studies such as N¿stor Garc¿a Canclini's work, James Scott's ¿arts of resistance¿ and ¿hidden transcripts,¿ and post-colonial theory.

Knowledge, ignorance and the popular culture: climate change versus the ozone hole
Sheldon Ungar - University of Toronto at Scarborough, ungar@scar.utoronto.ca
Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 9, No. 3, 297-312 (2000)
This paper begins with the "knowledge-ignorance paradox"—the process by which the growth of specialized knowledge results in a simultaneous increase in ignorance. It then outlines the roles of personal and social motivations, institutional decisions, the public culture, and technology in establishing consensual guidelines for ignorance. The upshot is a sociological model of how the "knowledge society" militates against the acquisition of scientific knowledge. Given the assumption of widespread scientific illiteracy, the paper tries to show why the ozone hole was capable of engendering some public understanding and concern, while climate change failed to do so. The ozone threat encouraged the acquisition of knowledge because it was allied and resonated with easy-to-understand bridging metaphors derived from the popular culture. It also engendered a "hot crisis." That is, it provided a sense of immediate and concrete risk with everyday relevance. Climate change fails at both of these criteria and remains in a public limbo.

Strong plots: The relationship between Popular Culture and Management Practice & Theory - Czarniawska, Barbara (Barbara.Czarniawska@gri.gu.se) (Gothenburg Research Institute)
Rhodes, Carl (Carl.Rhodes@uts.edu.au) (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia)
Abstract: In this paper we consider the relationship between popular culture and management practice. Starting with references to previously established connections between high culture and management, we turn to popular culture for the same kind of connection. We suggest that much popular culture is based on established and repeated patterns of emplotment, and we go on to examine how it might teach practices and provide models for how practice is understood. The "strong plots", we claim, provide possible blueprints for the management of meaning in organizations. We illustrate our ideas with three types of text. The first is an ethnographic study of an organization in decline. Here we show how management practice that attempted to work outside of the heroic emplotment of management action was resisted in the organization. The second example concerns two popular novels about the financial services industry. We point out that these novels perpetuate particular strong plots in relation to gendered practices in financial services. Thirdly, we turn to two examples of the parody of working life in comic strips and animated cartoons. In this case we demonstrate that popular culture can also be a site for the critique of, and resistance to, strong plots. In conclusion we suggest a role for management research consisting in questioning strong plots in both culture and management practice through avant-garde practices of experimentation and creation.

Television & Popular Culture - onderzoekinformatie.nl/en/oi/nod/onderzoek/OND1303319/
Abstract Starting from the realization that the benefits of cultural studies involvement during the 1980s in debates about media and culture have been woven into both common knowledge and production practices, there is a need to develop a new critical vocabulary to understand how television and popular culture function culturally. This move from both common-sense understandings of television and a focus on production to television s cultural dimensions is not new. However, a re-orientation of the relationship between them is a pressing concern. This is particularly so given that terms like culture come to signify quite dramatically different concepts and rethinking the links between them is important if one is to understand contemporary television in its present textual, affective, technological, and institutional dimensions. There have been visions of what television might be and what it might do socially and culturally long before the medium came into being. Metaphors and names like tele-vision, seeing far; or broadcasting spreading wide thoughts and images that would unite nations suggest the potential invested in television. Teleporting is television s strength. In this research domain, television will be understood as a multiform object of analysis. Television has, first of all, distinctive cultural forms (liveness and seriality have been appropriated and rewritten from older cultural modes); it offers distinct cultural experience (closing of distance; immediacy); it has distinctive generic modes (genre hybridity); it creates new types of public roles and star texts, and has unique forms of programming. Changing fast under multimedial conditions, television is now more mobile, which raises questions about the authority of the medium to define the world and how it uses its historically defined characteristics to write new scripts for understanding reality. While in the 1980s cultural studies offered revolutionary terms such as pleasure to revalue everyday practices of media use in a combined theoretical and political project, such terms seem inappropriate or insufficient in today s landscape of everyday media use, increasing globalization and the merging of media production in global conglomerates. Contemporary media users are widely recognized as literate and cynical, fully aware of the conditions under which they consume media and popular culture. The media (more than academic or journalistic media critique) are invested in exploring boundaries and rewriting rules of ethics and quality, of reality and authenticity, of decency and morality. By looking at the mobility of meaning production, and the ways in which authority is established by recourse to speed, dialogue and publicity rather than by standards or brands, it will become clear how neither the classic terms of cultural studies, nor such distinctions as between the private and the public, or high and low culture for that matter, are of much use. Academic research in the realm of television and popular culture needs to recognize the impressive power of the industry to draw agendas for discussion of media content and use. Academia has, however, its own responsibility to engender debate and find space for alternative agendas and the development of critical response. The obvious means for humanities scholars are to historicize and re-theorize developments in the field and in everyday practice. We propose to look at three types of practices: 1. Practices of production 2. Practices of reception 3. Practices of critique These practices involve all aspects of television and popular culture: specific texts, the groups who make and use them, and the contexts in which they do so. They provide a perspective to look at television and popular culture, without marking social or cultural domains. Under practices of critique for instance, high theory might be the point of departure to look at particular developments in media production and concrete products. Likewise, practices of reception include the textual and production context, while questions for research projects related to this question start from a reception point of view, e.g. materially available as a particular type of fandom.