Download or read book Pop Culture for Beginners written by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2021-08-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pop Culture for Beginners promotes reflective engagement with the world around us and provides a set of tools for thinking critically about how meaning is created, reinforced, and circulated. Privileging a semiotic approach, the book’s first part, “The Pop Culture Toolbox,” outlines the development of pop culture studies; explains the semiotic framework; introduces students to a variety of critical lenses including Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and Critical Race Theory; and then offers an overview of several pop culture “pivot points” including authenticity, convergence culture, intersectionality, intertextuality, and subculture. The book’s second part provides a series of units, prepared in consultation with subject area experts, built around topics central to popular culture studies: television and film, music, comics, gaming, social media, and fandom. Each chapter includes “Your Turn” activities and discussion questions, as well as possible assignments and suggestions for further reading. The unit chapters in part two also include enabling questions as beginning points for thinking critically and sample readings demonstrating relevant scholarly approaches to popular culture; important vocabulary terms throughout are included in a substantive glossary at the end.
Download or read book Introducing Philosophy Through Pop Culture written by William Irwin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-11-18 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can South Park tell us about Socrates and the nature of evil? How does The Office help us to understand Sartre and existentialist ethics? Can Battlestar Galactica shed light on the existence of God? Introducing Philosophy Through Pop Culture uses popular culture to illustrate important philosophical concepts and the work of the major philosophers With examples from film, television, and music including South Park, The Matrix , X-Men, Batman, Harry Potter, Metallica and Lost, even the most abstract and complex philosophical ideas become easier to grasp Features key essays from across the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, as well as helpful editorial material and a glossary of philosophical terms From metaphysics to epistemology; from ethics to the meaning of life, this unique introduction makes philosophy as engaging as popular culture itself Supplementary website available with teaching guides, sample materials and links to further resources at www.pop-philosophy.org
Download or read book Pop Music Pop Culture written by Chris Rojek and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011-06-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is happening to pop music and pop culture? Synthesizers, samplers and MDI systems have allowed anyone with basic computing skills to make music. Exchange is now automatic and weightless with the result that the High Street record store is dying. MySpace, Twitter and You Tube are now more important publicity venues for new bands than the concert tour routine. Unauthorized consumption in the form of illegal downloading has created a financial crisis in the industry. The old postwar industrial planning model of pop, which centralized control in the hands of major record corporations, and divided the market into neat segments, is dissolving in front of our eyes. This book offers readers a comprehensive guide to understanding pop music today. It provides a clear survey of the field and a description of core concepts. The main theoretical approaches to the analysis of pop are described and critically assessed. The book includes a major investigation of the revolutionary changes in the production, exchange and consumption of pop music that are currently underway. Pop Music, Pop Culture is an accomplished, magnetically interesting guide to understanding pop music today.
Download or read book Pure Invention written by Matt Alt and published by Crown. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions that captured—and transformed—the world’s imagination. “A masterful book driven by deep research, new insights, and powerful storytelling.”—W. David Marx, author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style Japan is the forge of the world’s fantasies: karaoke and the Walkman, manga and anime, Pac-Man and Pokémon, online imageboards and emojis. But as Japan media veteran Matt Alt proves in this brilliant investigation, these novelties did more than entertain. They paved the way for our perplexing modern lives. In the 1970s and ’80s, Japan seemed to exist in some near future, gliding on the superior technology of Sony and Toyota. Then a catastrophic 1990 stock-market crash ushered in the “lost decades” of deep recession and social dysfunction. The end of the boom should have plunged Japan into irrelevance, but that’s precisely when its cultural clout soared—when, once again, Japan got to the future a little ahead of the rest of us. Hello Kitty, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and multimedia empires like Dragon Ball Z were more than marketing hits. Artfully packaged, dangerously cute, and dizzyingly fun, these products gave us new tools for coping with trying times. They also transformed us as we consumed them—connecting as well as isolating us in new ways, opening vistas of imagination and pathways to revolution. Through the stories of an indelible group of artists, geniuses, and oddballs, Pure Invention reveals how Japan’s pop-media complex remade global culture.
Download or read book Pop Culture Pioneers written by Cher Martinetti and published by Running Press Adult. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrate the empowering and inspiring women who helped create, shape, and make pop culture great, from the creator of SYFY WIRE's FANGRRLS and the podcast "Forgotten Women of Genre"! In every medium in popular culture—from books, films, and video games to comics, television, and animation—women have been instrumental in creating and shaping the worlds, characters, and genres that we know and love. However, much of their hard work and innovation has gone largely unrecognized—until now. With a foreword by American Gods actress Yetide Badaki and essays exploring the history and transformation of pop culture's genres and mediums, Pop Culture Pioneers explores and pays respect to the women who played a crucial role in creating and influencing of some of the most famous worlds and characters in pop culture including: Directors & Producers like Karyn Kusama (Aeon Flux, Jennifer's Body), Denise Di Novi (co-producer of Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas), and Jean MacCurdy (producer of Batman: The Animated Series, Animaniacs) Writers & Editors like Jeanette Khan (editor and publisher of DC Comics), Alice Bradley Sheldon (writing as James Tiptree Jr.), and Alison Bechdel (Fun Home) Animators & Artists like Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe), Noelle Stevenson (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power) and Brenda Chapman (animator and director of Brave) As well as Marlene Clark (Blaxploitation actress), Roberta Williams (creator of the adventure game genre), Yvonne Blake (costume designer for Superman), Bonnie Erickson (co-creator of Miss Piggy), and many more.
Download or read book Comic Con and the Business of Pop Culture What the World s Wildest Trade Show Can Tell Us About the Future of Entertainment written by Rob Salkowitz and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2012-06-22 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Comic-Con phenomenon—and what it means for your business The annual trade show Comic-Con International isn’t just fun and games. According to award-winning business author and futurist Rob Salkowitz it’s a “massive focus group and marketing megaphone” for Hollywood—and in Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, he examines the business of popular culture through the lens of Comic-Con. Salkowitz offers an entertaining and substantive look at the show, providing a close look at the comic-book and videogame industries’ expanding influence on marketing, merchandising, and the entertainment industry. Rob Salkowitz is founder and Principle Consultant for the communications firm MediaPlant, LLC.
Download or read book Pop Culture Russia written by Birgit Beumers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-06-21 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing look at contemporary Russian popular culture, exploring the historical and social influences that make it unique. Pop music is only one aspect of contemporary Russian culture that has taken some unexpected turns in the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. Television and advertising, theater and cinema, athletics and religion, even fashion and food now reflect more exposure to the West, yet remain in essence distinctively Russian. Pop Culture Russia! introduces readers to the fascinating, often surprising, post-Soviet cultural landscape. With chapters on media, the arts, recreation, religion, and consumerism, the book offers an insightful survey of Russian mass culture from the death of Stalin in 1953 to the present, exploring the historical significance of important events and trends, as well as the social and political contexts from which they emerged.
Download or read book Seinfeldia written by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An uproarious behind-the-scenes account of the creation of the hit television series describes how comedians Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld dreamed up the idea for an unconventional sitcom over coffee and how, despite network skepticism and minimal plotlines, achieved mainstream success, "--NoveList.
Download or read book The Language of Pop Culture written by Valentin Werner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together contributions from both leading and emerging scholars in one comprehensive volume to showcase the richness of linguistic approaches to the study of pop culture and their potential to inform linguistic theory building and analytical frameworks. The book features examples from a dynamic range of pop culture registers, including lyrics, the language of fictional TV series, comics, and musical subcultures, as a means of both providing a rigorous and robust description of these forms through the lens of linguistic study but also in outlining methodological issues involved in applying linguistic approaches. The volume also explores the didactic potential of pop culture, looking at the implementation of pop culture traditions in language learning settings. This collection offers unique insights into the interface of linguistic study and the broader paradigm of pop culture scholarship, making this an ideal resource for graduate students and researchers in applied linguistics, English language, media studies, cultural studies, and discourse analysis.
Download or read book Jane Michael Stern s Encyclopedia of Pop Culture written by Jane Stern and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 1992 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An A to Z of Who's Who and What's What, from Aerobics and Bubble Gum to "Valley of the Dolls" and Moon Unit Zappa.
Download or read book Hop on Pop written by Henry Jenkins III and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-23 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hop on Pop showcases the work of a new generation of scholars—from fields such as media studies, literature, cinema, and cultural studies—whose writing has been informed by their ongoing involvement with popular culture and who draw insight from their lived experiences as critics, fans, and consumers. Proceeding from their deep political commitment to a new kind of populist grassroots politics, these writers challenge old modes of studying the everyday. As they rework traditional scholarly language, they search for new ways to write about our complex and compelling engagements with the politics and pleasures of popular culture and sketch a new and lively vocabulary for the field of cultural studies. The essays cover a wide and colorful array of subjects including pro wrestling, the computer games Myst and Doom, soap operas, baseball card collecting, the Tour de France, karaoke, lesbian desire in the Wizard of Oz, Internet fandom for the series Babylon 5, and the stress-management industry. Broader themes examined include the origins of popular culture, the aesthetics and politics of performance, and the social and cultural processes by which objects and practices are deemed tasteful or tasteless. The commitment that binds the contributors is to an emergent perspective in cultural studies, one that engages with popular culture as the culture that "sticks to the skin," that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. By refusing to deny or rationalize their own often contradictory identifications with popular culture, the contributors ensure that the volume as a whole reflects the immediacy and vibrancy of its objects of study. Hop on Pop will appeal to those engaged in the study of popular culture, American studies, cultural studies, cinema and visual studies, as well as to the general educated reader. Contributors. John Bloom, Gerry Bloustein, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Diane Brooks, Peter Chvany, Elana Crane, Alexander Doty, Rob Drew, Stephen Duncombe, Nick Evans, Eric Freedman, Joy Fuqua, Tony Grajeda, Katherine Green, John Hartley, Heather Hendershot, Henry Jenkins, Eithne Johnson, Louis Kaplan, Maria Koundoura, Sharon Mazer, Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Angela Ndalianis, Edward O’Neill, Catherine Palmer, Roberta Pearson, Elayne Rapping, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, Greg Smith, Ellen Strain, Matthew Tinkhom, William Uricchio, Amy Villarego, Robyn Warhol, Charles Weigl, Alan Wexelblat, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi
Download or read book Long Division written by Kiese Laymon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi. Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared. Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan. City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).
Download or read book An Introduction to Popular Culture in the US written by Jenn Brandt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first introductory textbook to situate popular culture studies in the United States as an academic discipline with its own history and approach to examining American culture, its rituals, beliefs, and the objects that shape its existence.
Download or read book Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination written by Henry Jenkins and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.
Download or read book Everything Bad is Good for You written by Steven Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-05-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.
Download or read book The Pop Culture Parent written by Theodore A. Turnau, III and published by New Growth Press. This book was released on 2020-05-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parents often feel at a loss with popular culture and how it fits in with their families. They want to love their children well, but it can be overwhelming to navigate the murky waters of television, movies, games, and more that their kids are exposed to every day. Popular culture doesn’t have to be a burden. The Pop Culture Parent equips mothers, fathers, and guardians to build relationships with their children by entering into their popular culture–informed worlds, understanding them biblically, and passing on wisdom. This resource by authors Ted Turnau, E. Stephen Burnett, and Jared Moore, provides Scripture-based, practical help for parents to enjoy the messy gift of popular culture with their kids. By engaging with their children’s interests, parents can explore culture while teaching their children to become missionaries in a post-Christian world. By providing realistic yet biblical encouragement for parents, the coauthors guide readers to engage with popular culture through a gospel lens, helping them teach their kids to understand and answer the challenges raised by popular culture. The Pop Culture Parent helps the next generation of evangelicals move beyond a posture of cultural ignorance to one of cultural engagement, building grace-oriented disciples and cultural missionaries.
Download or read book Millennials and the Pop Culture written by William Strauss and published by Lifecourse Associates. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
