You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Lady Gaga represents both the height of celebrity and a disruption of the norms surrounding the social position. This book charts the way the pop star manages the celebrity persona in her relationships with her fans, the development of her gender identity, her parodying of other celebrities, and her navigation of the legal and economic system that make up the music industry. Much of Gaga's ability to maintain ownership of her identity comes from her early decisions to characterize herself as a performance artist. For Gaga, this means living the persona 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Gaga mimicks celebrity life in a self-conscious way that makes the mimicry apparent. Her performance of celebrity is an on-going project--despite what she may claim, she was not born this way. The excess of her celebrity is magnified by her title: Mother Monster. Historically, media narratives of celebrities, monsters, and mothers have centered on uncontrolled excesses that must be contained. Gaga adopts these personas, but refuses to submit to the containment that comes with each. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Popular American fiction has now secured a routine position in the higher education classroom despite its historic status as culturally suspect. This newfound respect and inclusion have almost certainly changed the pedagogical landscape, and Teaching Tainted Lit explores that altered terrain. If the academy has historically ignored, or even sneered at, the popular, then its new accommodation within the framework of college English is noteworthy: surely the popular introduces both pleasures and problems that did not exist when faculty exclusively taught literature from an established “high” canon. How, then, does the assumption that the popular matters affect teaching strategies, classroo...
The internet brings new urgency to the study of folklore. The digital networks we use every day amplify the capacity of legends to spread swiftly, define threats, and inform action. Using the case of a particularly popular digital bogeyman known as the Slender Man, Andrew Peck brings the study of legends into the twenty-first century. Peck explains not only how legends circulate in the digital swirl of the internet but also how the internet affects how legends seep into our offline lives and into the mass media we consume. What happens, he asks, when legends go online? How does the internet enable the creation of new legends? How do these ideas go viral? How do tradition and technology inter...
Rukmini Pande’s examination of race in fan studies is sure to make an immediate contribution to the growing field. Until now, virtually no sustained examination of race and racism in transnational fan cultures has taken place, a lack that is especially concerning given that current fan spaces have never been more vocal about debating issues of privilege and discrimination. Pande’s study challenges dominant ideas of who fans are and how these complex transnational and cultural spaces function, expanding the scope of the field significantly. Along with interviewing thirty-nine fans from nine different countries about their fan practices, she also positions media fandom as a postcolonial cyberspace, enabling scholars to take a more inclusive view of fan identity. With analysis that spans from historical to contemporary, Pande builds a case for the ways in which non-white fans have always been present in such spaces, though consistently ignored.
The 2016 US election was ugly, divisive, maddening, and influential. In this provocative new book, Paul Booth, Amber Davisson, Aaron Hess, and Ashley Hinck explore the effect that everyday people had on the political process. From viewing candidates as celebrities, to finding fan communities within the political spectrum, to joining others online in spreading (mis)information, the true influence in 2016 was the online participant. Poaching Politics brings together research and scholars from media studies, political communication, and rhetoric to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the role of participatory cultures in shaping the 2016 US presidential election. Poaching Politics heralds a new way of creating and understanding shifts in the nature of political communication in the digital age.
In this timely analysis of the economics of access that surround contemporary female celebrity, Hannah Yelin reveals a culture that requires women to be constantly ‘baring all’ in physical exposure and psychic confessions. As famous women tell their story, in their ‘own words’, constellations of ghostwriters, intermediaries and market forces undermine assertions of authorship and access to the ‘real’ woman behind the public image. Yelin’s account of the presence of the ghostwriter offers a fascinating microcosm of the wider celebrity machine, with insights pertinent to all celebrity mediation. Yelin surveys life-writing genres including fiction, photo-diary, comic-strip, and ar...
9.1 A Pragmatic Cultural Framework for Legal Analysis -- 9.2 Concluding Remarks -- Bibliography -- Index
At the start of the twenty-first century challenges to the global hegemony of U.S. culture are more apparent than ever. Two of the contenders vying for the hearts, minds, bandwidths, and pocketbooks of the world’s consumers of culture (principally, popular culture) are India and South Korea. “Bollywood” and “Hallyu” are increasingly competing with “Hollywood”—either replacing it or filling a void in places where it never held sway. This critical multidisciplinary anthology places the mediascapes of India (the site of Bollywood), South Korea (fountainhead of Hallyu, aka the Korean Wave), and the United States (the site of Hollywood) in comparative dialogue to explore the trans...
Ten years after the publication of the foundational edited collection Folklore and the Internet, Andrew Peck and Trevor J. Blank bring an essential update of scholarship to the study of digital folklore, Folklore and Social Media. A unique virtual, hybridized platform for human communication, social media is more dynamic, ubiquitous, and nuanced than the internet ever was by itself, and the majority of Americans use it to access and interact with digital source materials in more advanced and robust ways. This book features twelve chapters ranging in topics from legend transmission and fake news to case studies of memes, joke cycles, and Twitter hashtag campaigns and offers fresh insights on ...
Metabolizing Capital outlines a critical ecological framework to guide the theorization of writing and rhetoric in the dynamic contexts of Web 3.0 and environmental crisis. The rise of the global cloud and the internet-of-things have ushered in a new stage of the internet that marks a transition from the celebrated user-generated content of Web 2.0 to the data-driven networks of Web 3.0. As social media networks have expanded, so has the amount of writing and communication we do online. This has created several valuable sub-layers of data and metadata about consumer-citizens that corporations and governments now routinely collect, store, and monetize. This frenzy to collect more data is cont...