In this engrossing collection of essays, distinguished composer, theorist, journalist, and educator Arthur Berger invites us into the vibrant and ever-changing American music scene that has been his home for most of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and always entertaining, Berger describes the music scene in New York and Boston since the 1930s, discussing the heady days when he was a member of a tight-knit circle of avant-garde young composers mentored by Aaron Copland as well as his participation in a group at Harvard University dedicated to Stravinsky. As Virgil Thomson's associate on...
In this engrossing collection of essays, distinguished composer, theorist, journalist, and educator Arthur Berger invites us into the vibrant and ever...
In this entirely sophisticated and scholarly account of political culture, Arthur Asa Berger shows how the variety of cultural preferences creates the foundations of communication theory. Using the work of Aaron Wildavsky, the author shows how individualism, egalitarianism, collectivism, and fatalism form the basis of culture in complex societies. But more importantly, Berger breaks down the mechanical distinction between mass culture and elite culture, showing how they interpenetrate and crossover at the level of competitive and hierarchical frames. Agitpop, now in paperback, suggests that...
In this entirely sophisticated and scholarly account of political culture, Arthur Asa Berger shows how the variety of cultural preferences creates the...
The average person in America watches four hours of television per day and spends the equivalent of nine years of his or her life in front of the television set. If the attention most people devote to popular culture - listening to the news, watching soap operas, reading the comics-were added up, it would reveal that most people spend an enormous amount of time with popular culture which becomes in large measure, their culture. "Manufacturing Desire" is a study of how the mass media broadcast or spread various popular arts; further how the media and popular arts play a major role in shaping...
The average person in America watches four hours of television per day and spends the equivalent of nine years of his or her life in front of the tele...
This book offers a semiotically informed ethnographic study of contemporary culture in Rajasthan and in India generally. It adapts the methodology of analyzing cultures found in Roland Barthes' semiotic portrait of Japanese culture, Empire of Signs, but adds an analysis of lifestyles as explicated in the work of social anthropologist Mary Douglas, political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, and a number of other social scientists. This manuscript is, at first, a guide to Rajasthan and India, and it is that but it is also more in that it considers tourism from both an anthropological and...
This book offers a semiotically informed ethnographic study of contemporary culture in Rajasthan and in India generally. It adapts the methodology...
To be civilized involves, among other things, making, using, and buying objects. Although speculation on the significance of objects often tends to be casual, there are professionals--anthropologists, historians, semioticians, Marxists, sociologists, and psychologists--who analyze material culture in a systematic way and attempt to elicit from it reliable information about people, societies, and cultures. One reason that analyzing objects has been problematical for scholars is the lack of a sound methodology governing multidisciplinary research. Reading Matter addresses this problem by...
To be civilized involves, among other things, making, using, and buying objects. Although speculation on the significance of objects often tends to...
Is television a cultural wasteland, or a medium that has brought people more great art, music, dance, and drama than any previous media? How do we study and interpret television? What are the effects of television on individuals and society, and how do we measure them? What is the role of television in our political and economic life? Television in Society explores these issues in considering how television both reflects and affects society.
The book is divided into two sections. The first focuses on programming and deals with commercials, ceremonial events, important series...
Is television a cultural wasteland, or a medium that has brought people more great art, music, dance, and drama than any previous media? How do we ...
Just as a distinctive literary voice or style is marked by the ease with which it can be parodied, so too can specific aspects of humor be unique. Playwrights, television writers, novelists, cartoonists, and film scriptwriters use many special technical devices to create humor. Just as dramatic writers and novelists use specific devices to craft their work, creators of humorous materials--from the ancient Greeks to today's stand-up comics--have continued to use certain techniques in order to generate humor.
In The Art of Comedy Writing, Arthur Asa Berger argues that there...
Just as a distinctive literary voice or style is marked by the ease with which it can be parodied, so too can specific aspects of humor be unique. ...
