Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Popular Culture

By examining the cultural spaces occupied by youth--spaces represented in texts produced for youth, about youth, and in some cases by youth--contributors to this volume present challenging ways of applying critical ideas and theoretical frameworks to the crucial issues that surround youth and the cultures they inhabit as evidenced in their literature, magazines, computer games, films, television programs, popular music, and fashion. Many of the writers in this unique new collection write from provocative standpoints drawing on film and feminist theory, psychoanalytic criticism, semiotics,...

Through a series of engaging and interlinked case studies on the news magazine, Hollywood film, brand advertising, and movie colorization, this volume examines the resurgence of the black and white image in the 1990s. At a time when American culture was undergoing both diversification and demystification, the black and white image became the expression of nostalgia as a cultural style and was strategically used in the media to visualize a sense of American memory, heritage, and identity. Challenging the current definition of nostalgia as a mood connected to longing and loss, the author...

As entertainers, corporations, and even the government pander to the lowest common denominator, American life becomes increasingly vicarious, prefabricated, and bereft of meaning. This book examines contemporary American consciousness, considering the factors that have driven society toward gossip and sensationalism at the cost of substance and depth.

Celebrity news, video games, cookie-cutter schools, and shopping, shopping, shopping. As entertainers, corporations, and even the government pander to the lowest common denominator, American life becomes increasingly vicarious,...

The social acceptance of tobacco use obscures the fact that it is the single greatest preventable cause of death in the U.S., and approximately 80% of those who use tobacco products began using them before the age of 18. Indeed, tobacco companies in the past routinely targeted youth in their marketing and advertising, hoping to hook kids young and keep them with their original brand. Snell explores the tobacco industry's campaign to attract youth smokers and provides an overview of the FDA's investigation of the tobacco industry and how those investigations revealed the industry's...

At a time when the methods and purposes of intelligence agencies are under a great deal of scrutiny, author Wesley Britton offers an unprecedented look at their fictional counterparts. In Beyond Bond: Spies in Film and Fiction, Britton traces the history of espionage in literature, film, and other media, demonstrating how the spy stories of the 1840s began cementing our popular conceptions of what spies do and how they do it. Considering sources from Graham Greene to Ian Fleming, Alfred Hitchcock to Tom Clancy, Beyond Bond looks at the tales that have intrigued readers and...

The concept of ethnic, racial, and gender humor is as sensitive a subject today as it has ever been; yet at no time in the past have we had such a quantity of this humor circulating throughout society. We can see the power of such content manifested continually in our culture's films and stand-up comedy routines, as well as on popular TV sitcoms, where Jewish, black, Asian, Hispanic, and gay characters and topics have seemingly become essential to comic scenarios. Though such humor is often cruel, it can be a source of pride and play among minorities, women, and gays. Leon Rappoport's...

Vegetarianism is not a diet trend, or the flavor of the month. Instead, it is a philosophy and practice with roots in antiquity. Vegetarianism has existed for centuries in much of the world as a social movement and subculture. In the United States, this subculture has existed for more than 200 years. In this book, the Iacobbos bring this thriving subculture to life. By examining its businesses, organizations, events, scholarship, and influence on the arts, and by interviewing dozens of vegetarians and vegans, the authors reveal a subculture whose members hold a variety of perspectives on...

Ever since the rise of mass culture, the idea of The City has played a central role in the nation's imagined landscape. While some writers depict the city as a site of pleasure and enjoyment, the thrills provided there are still generally of an illicit nature, and it is this darker strain of urban fiction-one that illuminates many of the larger fears and anxieties of America at large-that this book addresses. From The Wire's Baltimore to Martin Scorsese's New York, from the Newark of Philip Roth and The Sopranos, to Jeffrey Eugenides's Detroit, The City is everywhere, and...

After the death of James Dean in 1955, the figure of the teen rebel permeated the globe, and its presence is still felt in the twenty-first century. Rebel iconography--which does not have to resemble James Dean himself, but merely incorporates his disaffected attitude--has become an advertising mainstay used to sell an array of merchandise and messages. Despite being overused in advertisements, it still has the power to surprise when used by authors and filmmakers in innovative and provocative ways.

The rebel figure has mass appeal precisely because of its ambiguities; it can mean...

For much of the 20th century, an apparently solid conceptual wall allowed us to separate information and bodies. Information is that which exists between elements; bodies are the elements themselves. One is abstract the other corporeal. One is intricately involved in signs and syntax, the other in cells and organs. Yet in the last few decades, it has become increasingly clear that this conceptual wall leaks--bodies and information will not stay separate from one another. Data have become flesh just as flesh has become data. Semiotic Flesh marks an important contribution to the...

Trick-or-treating. Flower girls. Bedtime stories. Bar and bat mitvah. In a nation of increasing ethnic, familial, and technological complexity, the patterns of children's lives both persist and evolve. This book considers how such events shape identity and transmit cultural norms, asking such questions as:

* How do immigrant families negotiate between old traditions and new?
* What does it mean when children engage in ritual insults and sick jokes?
* How does playing with dolls reflect and construct feelings of racial identity?
* Whatever happened to the practice of...

Reefer Madness, a classic in the annals of hemp literature, is the popular social history of marijuana use in America. Beginning with the hemp farming if George Washington, author Larry "Ratso" Sloman traces the fascinating story of our nation's love-hate relationship with the resilient weed we know as marijuana.

Herein we find antiheroes such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Mitchum (the first Hollywood actor busted for pot), Louis Armstrong (who smoked pot every day), the Beatles, and more rapscallions standing up for, supporting, smoking, and politicizing the bounties of...