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Materiality and Popular Culture
This book critically approaches contemporary meanings of materiality and discuses ways in which we understand, experience, and engage with objects through popular culture in our private, social and professional lives. Appropriating Arjun Appadurai’s famous phrase: "the social life of things", with which he inspired scholars to take material culture more seriously and, as a result, treat it as an important and revealing area of cultural studies, the book explores the relationship between material culture and popular practices, and points to the impact they have exerted on our co-existence with material worlds in the conditions of late modernity.
Méliès Boots
Before he became an influential cinematic innovator, Georges Méliès (1861–1938) was a maker of deluxe French footwear, an illusionist, and a caricaturist. Proceeding from these beginnings, Méliès Boots traces how the full trajectory of Georges Méliès’ career during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, along with the larger cultural and historical contexts in which Méliès operated, shaped his cinematic oeuvre. Solomon examines Méliès’ unpublished drawings and published caricatures, the role of laughter in his magic theater productions, and the constituent elements of what Méliès called "the new profession of the cinéaste." The book also reveals Méliès' connections to the Incohérents, a group of ephemeral artists from the 1880s, demonstrating the group’s relevance for Méliès, early cinema, and modernity. By positioning Méliès in relation to the material culture of his time, Solomon demonstrates that Méliès’ work was expressive of a distinctly modern, and modernist, sensibility that appeared in France during the 1880s in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution.
The Stuff of Spectatorship
Film and television create worlds, but they are also of a world, a world that is made up of stuff, to which humans attach meaning. Think of the last time you watched a movie: the chair you sat in, the snacks you ate, the people around you, maybe the beer or joint you consumed to help you unwind—all this stuff shaped your experience of media and its influence on you. The material culture around film and television changes how we make sense of their content, not to mention the very concepts of the mediums. Focusing on material cultures of film and television reception, The Stuff of Spectatorship argues that the things we share space with and consume as we consume television and film influence the meaning we gather from them. This book examines the roles that six different material cultures have played in film and television culture since the 1970s—including video marketing, branded merchandise, drugs and alcohol, and even gun violence—and shows how objects considered peripheral to film and television culture are in fact central to its past and future.
The Rise of Transtexts
This volume builds on previous notions of transmedia practices to develop the concept of transtexts, in order to account for both the industrial and user-generated contributions to the cross-media expansion of a story universe. On the one hand exists industrial transmedia texts, produced by supposedly authoritative authors or entities and directed to active audiences in the aim of fostering engagement. On the other hand are fan-produced transmedia texts, primarily intended for fellow members of the fan communities, with the Internet allowing for connections and collaboration between fans. Through both case studies and more general analyses of audience participation and reception, employing the artistic, marketing, textual, industrial, cultural, social, geographical, technological, historical, financial and legal perspectives, this multidisciplinary collection aims to expand our understanding of both transmedia storytelling and fan-produced transmedia texts.
Matrix Activism
The intersection of virtual and physical spaces at the heart of contemporary political protests is a pivotal element in new practices of activism. In this new and global ecology of dissent and activism, different forces, stakeholders, and spaces, once defiantly discordant, come together to define the increasingly malleable nature and terms of participatory politics and the performance of democracy. This book explores the emerging sites, aesthetics and politics of contemporary dissent as a critical attempt to foreground their mediation and negotiation in an era of neoliberal globalization. Contemporary forms of media activism occupy deeply ambivalent spaces, which Ardizzoni analyzes using the lens of what she calls "matrix activism." Rather than confining the analysis to a single platform, a single technology, or a single social actor, matrix activism allows us to explain the hybrid nature of new forms of dissent and resistance, as they are located at the intersection of alternative and mainstream, non-profit and corporate, individual and social, production and consumption, online and offline.
Histories of Laughter and Laughter in History
Laughter is often no laughing matter, and, as such, it deserves continued scholarly attention as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon. This collection of essays is a meeting ground for scholars from several disciplines, including historians, philologists, and scholars of social sciences, to discuss places and roles of laughter in history, in historical narratives, and in cultural anthropology from prehistory to the present. The common foci of the papers gathered in this volume are to examine laughter and its meanings, to reflect on the place of laughter in Western history and literature, to disclose laughter’s manipulative potential in historical and literary narratives, to see it in the light of the concepts of carnivalesque and playfulness, to see it as a reflection of hysterical historicizing, to see its place in comedy, farce, grotesque and irony, and to see it against its broadly understood theoretical, philosophical and psychological aspects. The book will appeal chiefly to an academic readership, including students, historians, literary and cultural scholars, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists.
Pedagogy in the Anthropocene
This book explores new pedagogical challenges and potentials of the Anthropocene era. The authors argue that this new epoch, with an unstable climate, new kinds of globally spreading viruses, and new knowledges, calls for a new way of educating and an alertness to new philosophies of education and pedagogical imaginations, thoughts, and practices. Addressing the linkages between the Anthropocene and Pedagogy across a broad pedagogical spectrum that is both formal and informal, the editors and their contributors emphasize a re-imagining of education that serves to deepen our understanding of the capacities and values of life.
Narratives of Disability and Illness in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
This study offers a detailed analysis of the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, including the novels of the South African and Australian periods, to demonstrate the development of Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of non-normative embodiment. In this illuminating monograph, Pawel Wojtas demonstrates the extent to which Coetzee's multifaceted depictions of disability offer a sustained critique of the ableist implications of political violence and neoliberal inclusionism alike. Exploring a wide range of notions, such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, disability Gothic, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy, Wojtas shows how Coetzee's 'disabled textuality' provokes a sustained meditation on various forms of cultural denigration of disability experience.
Girlhood, Schools, and Media
This book explores the circulation and reception of popular discourses of achieving girlhood, and the ways in which girls themselves participate in such circulation. It examines the figure of the achieving girl within wider discourses of neoliberal self-management and post-feminist possibility, considering the tensions involved in being both successful and successfully feminine and the strategies and negotiations girls undertake to manage these tensions. The work is grounded in an understanding of media, educational, and peer contexts for the production of the successful girl. It traces narratives across school, television and online in texts produced for and by girls, drawing on interviews with girls in schools, online forum participation (within the purpose-built site www.smartgirls.tv), and girls’ discussions of a range of teen dramas.
