Conspiracy culture Livers, Keith A
Conspiracy culture,
2020, 2020, 2020-09-25, 2020-10-01
eBook
"Contemporary Russia stands apart as one of the most prolific generators of conspiracy theories and paranoid rhetoric. Conspiracy Culture traces the roots of the phenomenon within the sphere of ...culture and history, examining the long arc of Russian paranoia from the present moment back to earlier nineteenth-century sources, such as Dostoevsky's anti-nihilist novel Demons. Conspiracy Culture examines the use of conspiracy tropes by contemporary Russian authors and filmmakers including the postmodernist writer Viktor Pelevin, the conservative author and pundit Aleksandr Prokhanov, and the popular director Timur Bekmambetov. It also explores paranoia as an instrument within contemporary Russian political rhetoric, as well as in Russian pseudo-historical works. What stands out is the manner in which Russian popular paranoia is utilized to express broadly shared fears not only of a long-standing anti-Russian conspiracy undertaken by the West, but also about the destruction of the country's cultural and spiritual capital within this imagined "Russophobic" plot."--
Timur (or Tamerlane) is famous as the fourteenth-century conqueror of much of Central Eurasia and the founder of the Timurid dynasty. His reputation lived on in his native lands and reappeared some ...three centuries after his death in the form of fictional biographies, authored anonymously in Persian and Turkic. These biographies have become part of popular culture. Despite a direct continuity in their production from the eighteenth century to the present, they remain virtually unknown to people outside the region. This remarkable and rigorous scholarly appraisal of the legendary biographies of Tamerlane is the first of its kind in any language. The book sheds light not only on the character of Tamerlane and how he was remembered and championed by many generations after his demise, but also on the era in which the biographies were written and how they were conceived and received by the local populace during an age of crisis in their own history.
The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, ...modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity.
Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history,Modernism Is the Literature of Celebritybegins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.
The International group of contributors of this volume provides, collectively, a multi-layered analysis of the emerging East Asian media culture, using the Korean TV drama as its analytic vehicle. By ...closely examining the political economy of TV industry,
A spirited collection of essays that get to the heart of
what gives popular culture its emotional impact
Vaudevillians used the term "the wow climax" to refer to the
emotional highpoint of their ...acts-a final moment of peak spectacle
following a gradual building of audience's emotions. Viewed by most
critics as vulgar and sensationalistic, the vaudeville aesthetic
was celebrated by other writers for its vitality, its liveliness,
and its playfulness. The Wow Climax follows in the path of
this more laudatory tradition, drawing out the range of emotions in
popular culture and mapping what we might call an aesthetic of
immediacy. It pulls together a spirited range of work from Henry
Jenkins, one of our most astute media scholars, that spans
different media (film, television, literature, comics, games),
genres (slapstick, melodrama, horror, exploitation cinema), and
emotional reactions (shock, laughter, sentimentality). Whether
highlighting the sentimentality at the heart of the Lassie
franchise, examining the emotional experiences created by horror
filmmakers like Wes Craven and David Cronenberg and avant garde
artist Matthew Barney, or discussing the emerging aesthetics of
video games, these essays get to the heart of what gives popular
culture its emotional impact.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, questions of identity have dominated the culture not only of Russia, but of all the countries of the former Soviet bloc. This timely collection examines the ...ways in which cultural activities such as fiction, TV, cinema, architecture and exhibitions have addressed these questions and also describes other cultural flashpoints, from attitudes to language to the use of passports. It discusses definitions of political and cultural nationalism, as well as the myths, institutions and practices that moulded and expressed national identity. From post-Soviet recollections of food shortages to the attempts by officials to control popular religion, it analyses a variety of unexpected and compelling topics to offer fresh insights about this key area of world culture. Illustrated with numerous photographs, it presents the results of recent research in an accessible and lively way.
Perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union transformed every aspect of life in Russia, and as hope began to give way to pessimism, popular culture came to reflect the anxiety and despair felt by ...more and more Russians. Free from censorship for the first time in Russia's history, the popular culture industry (publishing, film, and television) began to disseminate works that featured increasingly explicit images and descriptions of sex and violence.
InOverkill, Eliot Borenstein explores this lurid and often-disturbing cultural landscape in close, imaginative readings of such works asYou're Just a Slut, My Dear!(Ty prosto shliukha, dorogaia!), a novel about sexual slavery and illegal organ harvesting; theNymphotrilogy of books featuring a Chechen-fighting sex addict; and theMad DogandAntikillerseries of books and films recounting, respectively, the exploits of the Russian Rambo and an assassin killing in the cause of justice. Borenstein argues that the popular cultural products consumed in the post-perestroika era were more than just diversions; they allowed Russians to indulge their despair over economic woes and everyday threats. At the same time, they built a notion of nationalism or heroism that could be maintained even under the most miserable of social conditions, when consumers felt most powerless.
For Borenstein, the myriad depictions of deviance in pornographic and also crime fiction, with their patently excessive and appalling details of social and moral decay, represented the popular culture industry's response to the otherwise unimaginable scale of Russia's national collapse. "The full sense of collapse," he writes, "required a panoptic view that only the media and culture industry were eager to provide, amalgamating national collapse into one master narrative that would then be readily available to most individuals as a framework for understanding their own suffering and their own fears."
After Broadcast News Williams, Bruce A.; Delli Carpini, Michael X.
09/2011
eBook
The new media environment has challenged the role of professional journalists as the primary source of politically relevant information. After Broadcast News puts this challenge into historical ...context, arguing that it is the latest of several critical moments, driven by economic, political, cultural and technological changes, in which the relationship among citizens, political elites and the media has been contested. Out of these past moments, distinct 'media regimes' eventually emerged, each with its own seemingly natural rules and norms, and each the result of political struggle with clear winners and losers. The media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century has been dismantled, but a new regime has yet to emerge. Assuring this regime is a democratic one requires serious consideration of what was most beneficial and most problematic about past regimes and what is potentially most beneficial and most problematic about today's new information environment.
This volume contributes to the vibrant, ongoing recuperative work on women’s writing by shedding new light on a group of authors commonly dismissed as middlebrow in their concerns and conservative in ...their styles and politics. The neologism ‘interfeminism’ – coined to partner Kristin Bluemel’s ‘intermodernism’ – locates this group chronologically and ideologically between two ‘waves’ of feminism, whilst also forging connections between the political and cultural monoliths that have traditionally overshadowed them. Drawing attention to the strengths of this ‘out-of-category’ writing in its own right, this volume also highlights how intersecting discourses of gender, class and society in the interwar and postwar periods pave the way for the bold reassessments of female subjectivity that characterise second and third wave feminism. The essays showcase the stylistic, cultural and political vitality of a substantial group of women authors of fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry and journalism including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Nancy Mitford, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, Kamala Markandaya, Susan Ertz, Marghanita Laski, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Pargeter, Eileen Bigland, Nancy Spain, Vera Laughton Matthews, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns, Shelagh Delaney, Stevie Smith and Penelope Mortimer. Additional exploration of the popular magazines Woman’s Weekly and Good Housekeeping and new material from the Vera Brittain archive add an innovative dimension to original readings of the literature of a transformative period of British social and cultural history. List of contributors: Natasha Periyan, Eleanor Reed, Maroula Joannou , Lola Serraf, Sue Kennedy, Ana Ashraf, Chris Hopkins, Gill Plain, Lucy Hall, Katherine Cooper, Nick Turner, Maria Elena Capitani, James Underwood, and Jane Thomas.
Undercurrents Leung, Helen Hok-Sze
Undercurrents,
c2008, 2009, 2014, 2008
eBook
Undercurrents engages the critical rubric of queer to examine Hong Kong's screen and media culture during the transitional and immediate postcolonial period. Helen Hok-Sze Leung draws on theoretical ...insights from a range of disciplines to reveal parallels between the crisis and uncertainty of the territory's postcolonial transition and the queer aspects of its cultural productions. She explores Hong Kong cultural productions � cinema, fiction, popular music, and subcultural projects � and argues that while there is no overt consolidation of gay and lesbian identities in Hong Kong culture, undercurrents of diverse and complex expressions of gender and sexual variance are widely in evidence. Undercurrents uncovers a queer media culture that has been largely overlooked by critics in the West and demonstrates the cultural vitality of Hong Kong amidst political transition.
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