Download or read book Consuming Utopia written by John Storey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consuming Utopia builds on critical insights into consumption and utopianism developed in two previous books by the author to elaborate what it means to read utopian fiction (including dystopian and anti-utopian) from the critical perspective of cultural studies. With a critical focus on social practices of reading rather than on the text itself, John Storey advances a timely and relevant contribution to existing debates on utopian fiction, offering new insights into how we might understand the politics of utopian fiction. Finding readership and readers indispensable to the act of producing politics beyond the text, Storey argues that if utopian fiction has a ‘politics’, it is determined by those who, in actuality, pick up books and act on what they read, rather than readers proposed by textuality. By engaging with seminal concepts in cultural studies, this book shows how reading utopian fiction works to make the meaning of such texts material and social, and therefore available for politics. An essential addition to the literature on utopian fiction, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the areas of cultural studies, literary studies, comparative literature, cultural politics, utopian studies, and political theory.
Download or read book Consuming the Romantic Utopia written by Eva Illouz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens? In her unique study of American love in the twentieth century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of images that define our ideas of love and romance, revealing that the experience of "true" love is deeply embedded in the experience of consumer capitalism. Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of clichés and images she calls the "Romantic Utopia." This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage. Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliché of romance—from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses—is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all. Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America.
Download or read book Consuming the Romantic Utopia written by Eva Illouz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997-05-29 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study begins with readings of ads, songs, films and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized.
Download or read book Consuming Utopia written by John Storey and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Consuming Utopia builds on critical insights into consumption and utopianism developed in two previous books by the author to elaborate what it means to read utopian fiction (including dystopian and anti-utopian) from the critical perspective of cultural studies. With a critical focus on social practices of reading rather than on the text itself, John Storey advances a timely and relevant contribution to existing debates on utopian fiction, offering new insights into how we might understand the politics of utopian fiction. Finding readership and readers indispensable to the act of producing politics beyond the text, Storey argues that if utopian fiction has a 'politics', it is determined by those who, in actuality, pick up books and act on what they read, rather than readers proposed by textuality. By engaging with seminal concepts in cultural studies, this book shows how reading utopian fiction works to make the meaning of such texts material and social, and therefore available for politics. An essential addition to the literature on utopian fiction, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the areas of cultural studies, literary studies, comparative literature, cultural politics, utopian studies, and political theory"--
Download or read book Consuming Modernity written by Carol Appadurai Breckenridge and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book aims to illustrate that what is distinctive about any particular society is not the fact of its modernity, but rather its own unique debates about modernity. Behind the embattled arena of culture in India, for example, lie particular social and political interests such as the growing middle class, the entrepreneurs and commercial institutions, and the state. The contributors address the roles of these various intertwined interests in the making of India's public culture, each examining different sites of consumption. The sites which are explored include cinema, radio, cricket, restaurants and tourism. The book also makes distinct the differences among public, mass and popular culture.
Download or read book Utopia written by Thomas More and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.
Download or read book Boys Love Media in Thailand written by Thomas Baudinette and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-05 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past several years, the Thai popular culture landscape has radically transformed due to the emergence of Boys Love (BL) soap operas which celebrate the love between handsome young men. Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture is the first book length study of this increasingly significant transnational pop culture phenomenon. Drawing upon six years of ethnographic research, the book reveals BL's impacts on depictions of same-sex desire in Thai media culture and the resultant mainstreaming of queer romance through new forms of celebrity and participatory fandom. The author explores how the rise of BL has transformed contemporary Thai consumer culture, leading to heterosexual female fans of male celebrities who perform homoeroticism becoming the main audience to whom Thai pop culture is geared. Through the case study of BL, this book thus also investigates how Thai media is responding to broader regional trends across Asia where the economic potentials of female and queer fans are becoming increasingly important. Baudinette ultimately argues that the center of queer cultural production in Asia has shifted from Japan to Thailand, investigating both the growing international fandom of Thailand's BL series as well as the influence of international investment into the development of these media. The book particularly focuses on specific case studies of the fandom for Thai BL celebrity couples in Thailand, China, the Philippines, and Japan to explore how BL series have transformed each of these national contexts' queer consumer cultures.
Download or read book Consumption written by John Storey and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a clear and wide-ranging overview of consumption as a sociological concept. Arguing that consumption is both an unavoidable part of life and an ongoing dialectical process, it gives a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption and the possibilities these frameworks can offer. Consumption is something we all do. It is not just another word for shopping. When we eat and drink, or when we read a book or watch TV, or visit an art gallery or spend an evening in a pub, we are consuming. There is not ‘a world of consumption’ that some of us do not enter. We are all consumers and consumption must be regarded as an important sociological concept as a result. Consumption is also connected to notions of ‘agency’ - what people do, rather than what is done to them or made available to them for their doings. Before the critical focus on consumption, it was assumed that the meaning and use of things was dictated by how they were produced or by their simple mute materiality. Focusing on consumption challenges this way of thinking: rather than the mute and predictable end point of production, it is rethought as an activity, a process, something we do that involves use and meaning. It is how most of us intervene in culture. This thought-provoking yet accessible book offers a valuable introduction of the concept of consumption for researchers and undergraduate and postgraduate students in a range of fields within the humanities and social sciences, including sociology, history, anthropology, English, media and cultural studies.
Download or read book Transformative Consumer Research for Personal and Collective Well being written by David Glen Mick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daily existence is more interconnected to consumer behaviours than ever before, encompassing many issues of well-being. This edited volume includes 33 chapters on a wide range of topics by expert international authors, including unhealthy eating, credit card mismanagement, alcohol, tobacco, and much more.
Download or read book Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema written by Anna Morcom and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since their beginnings in the 1930s, Hindi films and film songs have dominated Indian public culture in India, and have also made their presence felt strongly in many global contexts. Hindi film songs have been described on the one hand as highly standardized and on the other as highly eclectic. Anna Morcom addresses many of the paradoxes eccentricities and myths of not just Hindi film songs but also of Hindi cinema by analysing film songs in cinematic context. While the presence of songs in Hindi films is commonly dismissed aspurely commercial this book demonstrates that in terms of the production process, musical style, and commercial life, it is most powerfully the parent film that shapes and defines the film songs and their success rather than the other way round. While they constitute India‘s still foremost genre of popular music, film songs are also situational, dramatic sequences, inherently multi-media in style and conception. This book is uniquely grounded in detailed musical and visual analysis of Hindi film songs, song sequences and films as well as a wealth of ethnographic material from the Hindi film and music industries. Its findings lead to highly novel ways of viewing Hindi film songs, their key role in Hindi cinema, and how this affects their wider life in India and across the globe. It will be indispensable to scholars seeking to understand both Hindi film songs and Hindi cinema. It also forms a major contribution to popular music, popular culture, film music studies and ethnomusicology, tackling pertinent issues of cultural production, (multi-)media, and the cross-cultural use of music in Hindi cinema. The book caters for both music specialists as well as a wider audience.
Download or read book Nostalgia Now written by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the nature of nostalgia as an important emotion in contemporary society and social theory. Situated between the ‘sociology of emotions’ and ‘nostalgia studies’, it considers the reasons for which nostalgia appears to be becoming an increasingly significant and debated emotion in late-modern culture. With chapters offering studies of nostalgia at micro-, meso- and macro-levels of society, it offers insights into the rise to prominence of nostalgia and the attendant consequences. Thematically organised and examining the role of nostalgia on an individual level – in the lives of concrete individuals – as well as analysing its function on a more historical social level as a collective and culturally shared emotion, Nostalgia Now brings together the latest empirical and theoretical work on an important contemporary emotion and proposes new agendas for research. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, psychology and cultural studies with interests in the emotions.
Download or read book The History of Emotions written by Jan Plamper and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of emotions is one of the fastest growing fields in current historical debate. This is an introduction to the field, synthesising the current research, and offering direction for future study, moving beyond the traditional debate between social constructivist and universalist theories of emotion.
Download or read book Utopia Dystopia written by Michael D. Gordin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-23 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience. The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship. The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.
Download or read book Caring for Cultural Studies written by Alexandra Ganser and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2022-10-10 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume pays homage to Monika Seidl, a key figure of cultural studies at the University of Vienna's Department of English and American Studies and spotlights her many achievements in the field. The Festschrift on the occasion of her retirement reflects on cultural studies as a discipline, its history and possible futures, aspects of care as in crisis and as practiced by Monika Seidl, and engages with her academic work in articles of different styles by contributors including Magdalena Berger, Lawrence Grossberg, Sabine Harrer, Roman Horak, Christian Huck, Thomas Kühn, Elisabeth Lechner and Judith Kohlenberger, Barbara Maly-Bowie, Timo Frühwirth and Sandra Mayer, Anette Pankratz, Annegret Pelz, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Julia Pühringer, Susanne Reichl, Ranthild Salzer and John Storey. It includes a preface by Alexandra Ganser.
Download or read book Connected Worlds written by Ann Curthoys and published by ANU E Press. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together historians of imperialism and race, travel and modernity, Islam and India, the Pacific and the Atlantic to show how a 'transnational' approach to history offers fresh insights into the past. Transnational history is a form of scholarship that has been revolutionising our understanding of history in the last decade. With a focus on interconnectedness across national borders of ideas, events, technologies and individual lives, it moves beyond the national frames of analysis that so often blinker and restrict our understanding of the past. Many of the essays also show how expertise in 'Australian history' can contribute to and benefit from new transnational approaches to history. Through an examination of such diverse subjects as film, modernity, immigration, politics and romance, Connected Worlds weaves an historical matrix which transports the reader beyond the local into a realm which re-defines the meaning of humanity in all its complexity. Contributors include Tony Ballantyne, Desley Deacon, John Fitzgerald, Patrick Wolfe and Angela Woollacott.
Download or read book Globalization and Utopia written by P. Hayden and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking aim at the belief in utopia's demise, this collection of original essays offers a new look at the vibrant renewal of utopianism emerging in response to the challenges of globalization. It consider questions of hope and transformation associated with the utopian desire for social change.
Download or read book Rethinking Democracy for Post Utopian Worlds written by Jorge León Casero and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
