@contents: Selected Contents: Acknowledgements Why Fiske Still Matters Henry Jenkins Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular Kevin Glynn, Jonathan Gray and Pamela Wilson Notes on Contributors Preface Chapter 1 The Jeaning of America Chapter 2 Commodities and Culture Chapter 3 Productive Pleasures Chapter 4 Offensive Bodies and Carnival Pleasures Chapter 5 Popular Texts Chapter 6 Popular Discrimination Chapter 7 Politics References Index

Understanding popular culture

The notion of postfeminism has become one of the most important in the lexicon of feminist cultural an alysis. Yet there is little agreement about what postfeminism is. This article argues that postfeminism is best understood as a distinctive sensibility, made up of a number of interrelated themes. These include the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; an emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; and a resurgence of ideas about natural sexual difference. Each of these is explored in some detail, with examples from contemporary Anglo-American media. It is precisely the patterned articulation of these ideas that constitutes a postfeminist sensibility. The article concludes with a discussion of the connection between this sensibility and contemporary neoliberalism.

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Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility

Media enjoyment is theorized by synthesizing empirical literature from uses and gratifications with Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory. This article argues that enjoyment of media results from a flow experience realized when media message content balances with individual ability to interpret that message. Further, it theorizes that media experience, along with individual differences in cognitive abilities, facilitates or prevents flow state in media users. Therefore, it is a balance between individual differences in cognitive abilities and media message challenges that explains enjoyment of media use. The authors offer the case of video game usage as an exemplar, and examples of cognitive tasks are provided and linked to game genre content.

Flow and Media Enjoyment

This work provides an analysis of the ways that new media are experienced and studied as the subjects of history, using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks. In "Always Already New", Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, "Always Already New" speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanistic thought, after all, part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman's argument suggests inventive contexts for "humanities computing" while also offering a new perspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history. Making extensive use of archival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked text each emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of public life and public memory. In the end, Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history of the Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might be producing the conditions of its own historicity.

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Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture

In this study, 208 young adults completed questionnaires measuring their perceptions of and responses to their favorite fictional television characters, both male and female. Measures included perceived attitude similarity, perceived character attributes (smart, successful, attractive, funny, violent, admired), and wishful identification with the characters. Wishful identification was defined as the desire to be like or act like the character. Respondents reported greater wishful identification with same-gender characters and with characters who seemed more similar in attitudes. Both men and women identified more strongly with successful and admired characters of the other gender, but they differed in the attributes that predicted their wishful identification with same-gender characters. Men identified with male characters whom they perceived as successful, intelligent, and violent, whereas women identified with female characters whom they perceived as successful, intelligent, attractive, and admired. Hum...

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Young Adults' Wishful Identification With Television Characters: The Role of Perceived Similarity and Character Attributes

PrefaceAs recently as 1960, few universities offered courses of study in cinema. Film scholarship was the province of film buffs and a handful of brave academics whose love for the movies prompted them to write and teach film qon the side.q Today, there are few major universities that do not list at least one course in film, and nearly 100 colleges grant degrees in film studies and/or production. Library shelves groan under the proliferation of books on film published over the past twenty years, and a wide variety of academic journals showcase more specialized studies of the cinema as art form, industrial institution, medium of mass communication, and social force. In short, the movies have come of age as a field of academic inquiry.One of the signs of maturity of any new discipline is a consciousness of its own methods and approaches, successes and shortcomings. We believe that film history has reached the point that it deserves an examination of the historical questions that have been asked about the cinema's past and of the approaches that have been and might be taken in answering them. It is this function that Film History: Theory and Practice attempts to serve.Because this is the first book of its kind, a few words about its goals are necessary. First, it is not a chronological history of the cinema; rather, it establishes a context within which film history might be more profitably read and conducted. Our subject in this book is the historical study of film, not film itself. While we cover specific examples drawn from film history to illustrate issues, problems, and approaches, in no way do we pretend to have surveyed the whole of cinema history.The primary impetus for this book came from our frustrations as teachers of film history. Our students were all too eager to regard what they read in film history books as the single, indisputable truth, and most of them thought it heretical to question the film historian's methods, philosophical orientation, evidence, or conclusions. Survey texts contributed to the problem by remaining silent as to the process by which historical questions are posed, research conducted, evidence analyzed, and generalizations drawn. We felt a work was needed that would (1) place film history within the context of historical research in general; (2) acquaint the reader with the specific and, in some cases, unique problems confronting film historians; (3) survey the approaches that have been taken to the historical study of film; and (4) provide examples of various types of film historical research. Our goal, then, is to enable the student of film history to become a more sensitive and discriminating reader of film historical works and to enable him or her to conduct and write film history. Since fascination with film history greatly exceeds its study in the college classroom, we also believe such a book will prove useful to any reader interested in the movies and the serious study of their past.One exciting thing about film historical research that sets it apart from - some other branches of history is that it can be conducted nearly anywhere. Although some film historical research projects do require the use of rare films or data from film archives, others depend only on sources of data available in almost any community -- and, of course, on the imagination and perseverance of the researcher. For this reason we hope to break down the distinction between producers of film history (writers of film history books and teachers of film courses) and consumers of film history (readers of film books and students of film history). Students should be encouraged to leap across this barrier by investigating aspects of film history at the local level. Therefore, Chapter 8 contains several examples of local film historical research and a guide to local resources. Actually doing film history is the best way we know to discover that film historians are not infallible deities, but merely inquisitive mortals.This book does not attempt to establish the way of conducting film historical research. There is no one correct approach to film history, no one qsuperhistoryq that could be written if only this or that qcorrectq perspective were taken and all the qfactsq of film history uncovered. All models and approaches -- even the ones we adopt in the following chapters -- have their advantages and disadvantages. All make certain assumptions and are based on certain notions as to what makes history qwork.q As for obtaining all the qfactsq of film history, this is a futile task, since the domain of qall the factsq is infinite. We hope to show that film historians do not work in a vacuum, nor do they approach the study of film history uninfluenced by their culture, tastes, and philosophical orientation. Doing history requires judgment, not merely the transmission of the facts. Similarly we attempt to demonstrate that reading filmnhistory is an act of judgment, requiring the active involvement of the reader.n n

Film history: Theory and practice

From "Ma Perkins" and "One Man's Family" in the 1930s to "All My Children" in the 1980s, the soap opera has capture the imagination of millions of American men and women of all ages In Speaking of Soap Operas , Robert Allen undertakes a reexamination of the production and consumption of soap operas through the use of a unique investigatory model based on contemporary poetics and reader-response theory Although a considerable amount of research has been conducted on these programs, Allen argues that soap operas remain a phenomenon about which much is said but little is known Soap operas are different from most other media programming -- they appear formless, refuse to end, require little work on the part of the viewer, and bear no recognizable marks of authorship For these and other reasons, soap operas resist explanation from both traditional aesthetic and empiricist social science perspectives The daytime dramatic serials generate nearly a billion dollars in revenue each year for the three commercial networks Allen discusses in detail the economic and institutional functions of these programs in addition to the context of their production He also considers the historical development of the soap opera as advertising vehicle, narrative structure and "women's fiction" Speaking of Soap Operas is based on the author's own experiences as a soap opera viewer; extensive interviews with soap opera writers, producers, and actors; and the papers of Irna Phillips, creator of dozens of successful ratio and television soap operas Drawing also upon trade publications, popular periodicals, and broadcast archives, this work is an important contribution to the field of mass communication

Speaking of Soap Operas

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture.

Robert Allen's compelling book examines burlesque not only as popular entertainment but also as a complex and transforming cultural phenomenon. When Lydia Thompson and her controversial female troupe of "British Blondes" brought modern burlesque to the United States in 1868, the result was electric. Their impertinent humor, streetwise manner, and provocative parodies of masculinity brought them enormous popular success--and the condemnation of critics, cultural commentators, and even women's rights campaigners. Burlesque was a cultural threat, Allen argues, because it inverted the "normal" world of middle-class social relations and transgressed norms of "proper" feminine behavior and appearance. Initially playing to respectable middle-class audiences, burlesque was quickly relegated to the shadow-world of working-class male leisure. In this process the burlesque performer "lost" her voice, as burlesque increasingly revolved around the display of her body. Locating burlesque within the context of both the social transformation of American theater and its patterns of gender representation, Allen concludes that burlesque represents a fascinating example of the potential transgressiveness of popular entertainment forms, as well as the strategies by which they have been contained and their threats defused. |Robert Allen's compelling book examines burlesque not only as popular entertainment but also as a complex and transforming cultural phenomenon. Locating burlesque within the context of both the social transformation of American theater and its patterns of gender representation, Allen concludes that burlesque represents a fascinating example of the potential transgressiveness of popular entertainment forms, as well as the strategies by which they have been contained and their threats defused.

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture

Contributors: Robert C. Allen, James Collins, Jane Feuer, John Fiske, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, James Hay, E. Ann Kaplan, Sarah Ruth Kozloff, Ellen Seiter and Mimi White.

Robert C. Allen

Papers

Film history: Theory and practice

Speaking of Soap Operas

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture.

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture

Channels of discourse, reassembled : television and contemporary criticism