Download or read book Popular Pleasures written by Paul Duncum and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's many popular aesthetic pleasures have a very long history. Paul Duncum considers the historical critical discourses, and socio-political issues raised by aesthetic pleasures in fifteen thematic chapters. Using illustrative examples from the past, present, and across cultures, he challenges the idea of any decline of cultural standards and argues that no grounds exist for cultural pessimism. Refusing to condemn popular culture on the basis of taste, he reserves critique for the socio-political ideologies aesthetics invariably serve. Art history, film, cultural studies, and philosophical aesthetics are each employed to show that the sensory/emotional lures of today's popular culture are mostly identical to those of premodern fine art. They include the violent, the horrific, the sentimental, the exotic, the erotic, and the humorous. Some of these pleasures derive from our evolutionary biology; they are all an important part of what it means to be human, and central to understanding contemporary society. Examples are wide-ranging, including British seaside postcards, Disney films, Nazi propaganda, burlesque, modern advertising, as well as many exemplars of fine art. The book reveals fresh insights for all those studying visual culture, art history, aesthetics, media studies, and media and art education.
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 Consuming Pleasures written by Daniel Horowitz and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the essence of a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking. Consuming Pleasures reveals how a group of writers shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate. Historian Daniel Horowitz traces the emergence of these new perspectives through a series of intellectual biographies. With writers and readers from the United States at the center, the story begins in Western Europe in the early 1950s and ends in the early 1970s, when American intellectuals increasingly appreciated the rich inventiveness of popular culture. Drawing on sources both familiar and newly discovered, this transnational intellectual history plays familiar works off each other in fresh ways. Among those whose work is featured are Jürgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, C. L. R. James, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hoggart, members of London's Independent Group, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Susan Sontag, Reyner Banham, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
Download or read book Disturbing Pleasures written by Henry A. Giroux and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Disturbing Pleasures Henry Giroux demonstrates how his well-known theories of education, critical pedagogy and popular culture can be put to use in the classroom and in other cultural settings. Adding an entirely new dimension to his thinking about the cultural sites at which pedagogical practice takes place, Giroux illustrates how professors, school teachers and other cultural workers can appropriate what he refers to as a "pedagogy of cultural studies."
Download or read book Guilty Pleasures written by Hugh McIntosh and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guilty pleasures in one’s reading habits are nothing new. Late-nineteenth-century American literary culture even championed the idea that popular novels need not be great. Best-selling novels arrived in the public sphere as at once beloved and contested objects, an ambivalence that reflected and informed America’s cultural insecurity. This became a matter of nationhood as well as aesthetics: the amateurism of popular narratives resonated with the discourse of new nationhood. In Guilty Pleasures, Hugh McIntosh examines reactions to best-selling fiction in the United States from 1850 to 1920, including reader response to such best-sellers as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ben Hur, and Trilby as well as fictional representations—from Trollope to Baldwin—of American culture’s lack of artistic greatness. Drawing on a transatlantic archive of contemporary criticism, urban display, parody, and advertising, Guilty Pleasures thoroughly documents how the conflicted attitude toward popular novels shaped these ephemeral modes of response. Paying close attention to this material history of novel reading, McIntosh reveals how popular fiction’s unique status as socially saturating and aesthetically questionable inspired public reflection on what it meant to belong to a flawed national community.
Download or read book Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures written by Arielle Zibrak and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures reclaims the femme fictions dismissed as "trash" to celebrate the surprisingly cathartic pleasures of domination, privilege, and the material trappings of patriarchal culture"--
Download or read book Pleasure Activism written by adrienne maree brown and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—they create new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own. Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!
Download or read book Pleasure in Profit written by Laura Moretti and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-22 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth century, Japanese popular prose flourished as waves of newly literate readers gained access to the printed word. Commercial publishers released vast numbers of titles in response to readers’ hunger for books that promised them potent knowledge. However, traditional literary histories of this period position the writings of Ihara Saikaku at center stage, largely neglecting the breadth of popular prose. In the first comprehensive study of the birth of Japanese commercial publishing, Laura Moretti investigates the vibrant world of vernacular popular literature. She marshals new data on the magnitude of the seventeenth-century publishing business and highlights the diversity and porosity of its publishing genres. Moretti explores how booksellers sparked interest among readers across the spectrum of literacies and demonstrates how they tantalized consumers with vital ethical, religious, societal, and interpersonal knowledge. She recasts books as tools for knowledge making, arguing that popular prose engaged its audience cognitively as well as aesthetically and emotionally to satisfy a burgeoning curiosity about the world. Crucially, Moretti shows, readers experienced entertainment within the didactic, finding pleasure in the profit gained from acquiring knowledge by interacting with transformative literature. Drawing on a rich variety of archival materials to present a vivid portrait of seventeenth-century Japanese publishing, Pleasure in Profit also speaks to broader conversations about the category of the literary by offering a new view of popular prose that celebrates plurality.
Download or read book The City s Pleasures written by Shirine Hamadeh and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The City's Pleasures is the first historical investigation of the tremendous changes that affected the fabric and architecture of Istanbul in the century that followed the decisive return of the Ottoman court to the capital in 1703. These were spectacular times that witnessed the most extraordinary urban expansion and building explosion in the history of the city. Showing how architecture and urban form became involved in the representation and construction of a changing social order, Shirine Hamadeh reassesses the dominance of the paradigm of Westernization in interpretations of this period and challenges the suggestion that change in the eighteenth century could only occur by turning toward a now superior West. Drawing on a genre of Ottoman poetry written in celebration of the built environment and on a vast array of related textual and visual sources, Hamadeh demonstrates that architectural change was the result of a dynamic synthesis between internal and external factors, and closely mirrored the process of décloisonnement of the city's social landscape. Examining novel forms, spaces, and decorative vocabularies; changing patterns of patronage; and new patterns of architectural perception; The City's Pleasures shows how these exposed and reinforced the internal dynamics that were played out between a society in flux and a state anxious to recreate an ideal system of social hierarchies. Profoundly hybrid in nature, the new architectural idiom reflected a growing permeability between elite and middle-class sensibilities, an unprecedented degree of receptivity to Western and Eastern foreign traditions, and a clear departure from the parameters of the classical canon. Innovation became the new operative doctrine. As the built environment was experienced, perceived, and appreciated by contemporary observers, it increasingly revealed itself as a perpetual source of sensory pleasures.
Download or read book Simple Pleasures written by and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-05-31 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the little things that make life worth living? A walk in the countryside, perhaps; a log fire; a letter from a friend. In Simple Pleasures, some of the UK's best-loved writers and public figures ponder this conundrum and come up with their own answers, sharing their thoughts on, among other things, the joys of picking up litter, whittling sticks, reading aloud, and devouring a good cheese sandwich. With contributions from A. C. Grayling, Robert McCrum, Prue Leith, Sebastian Faulks and Ann Widdecombe, to name just a few, Simple Pleasures is perfect reading for anyone who appreciates - or aspires to - the finer, simpler things in life.
Download or read book Chamber s Journal of Popular Literature Science and Arts written by and published by . This book was released on 1868 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Guiltless Pleasures A David Sterritt Film Reader written by David Sterritt and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Real Knockouts written by Martha McCaughey and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1997-07 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unprecedented numbers of American women are today learning how to knock out, maim, even kill men who assault them. From behind the scenes of gun ranges, martial arts dojos, fitness centers offering "Cardio Combat", and in padded attacker courses like "Model Mugging", Real Knockouts demonstrates how self-defense trains women out of the femininity that makes them easy targets for men's abuse. And yet much feminist thought, like the broader American culture, seems deeply ambivalent about women's embrace of violence, even in self-defense. Investigating the connection between feminist theory and a woman's balled fist, McCaughey found self-defense culture to embody, literally, a new kind of feminism, one that will change forever the way we think of gender politics, the female body, and feminism itself.
Download or read book Healthy Pleasures written by Robert E. Ornstein and published by Sterling Publishing Company. This book was released on 1990-01-22 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores ways to extend our lives as we enrich them, by understanding the role of pleasure in our health.
Download or read book Empire of Pleasures written by Andrew Dalby and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An evocative survey of the sensory culture of the Roman Empire, showing how the Romans themselves depicted their food, wine and entertainments in literature and in art.
Download or read book Small Pleasures written by Clare Chambers and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ann Patchett—an astonishing, keenly observed period piece about an ordinary British woman in the 1950s whose dutiful life takes a sudden turn into a pitched battle between propriety and unexpected passion. "With wit and dry humor...quietly affecting in unexpected ways. Chambers' language is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: big pleasure wrought from small details."--The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It’s a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape. That all changes when a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth. Jean seizes onto the bizarre story and sets out to discover whether Gretchen is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys, including Gretchen’s gentle and thoughtful husband Howard, who mostly believes his wife, and their quirky and charming daughter Margaret, who becomes a sort of surrogate child for Jean. Gretchen, too, becomes a much-needed friend in an otherwise empty social life. Jean cannot bring herself to discard what seems like her one chance at happiness, even as the story that she is researching starts to send dark ripples across all their lives…with unimaginable consequences. Both a mystery and a love story, Small Pleasures is a literary tour-de-force in the style of The Remains of the Day, about conflict between personal fulfillment and duty; a novel that celebrates the beauty and potential for joy in all things plain and unfashionable.
Download or read book ENYA written by Chilly Gonzales and published by Rough Trade Books. This book was released on 2020-11-18 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chilly Gonzales is one of the most exciting, original, hard-to-pin-down musicians of our time. Filling halls worldwide at the piano in his slippers and a bathrobe—in any one night he can be dissecting the musicology of an Oasis hit, giving a sublime solo recital, and displaying his lyrical dexterity as a rapper. In his book about Enya, he asks: Does music have to be smart or does it just have to go to the heart? In dazzling, erudite prose Gonzales delves beyond her innumerable gold discs and millions of fans to excavate his own enthusiasm for Enya's singular music as well as the mysterious musician herself, and along the way uncovers new truths about the nature of music, fame, success and the artistic endeavour.