Journal of Popular Culture articles from December 2001

Journal of Popular Culture archives from December 2001

The popular culture economy.
December 22, 2001... Popular culture is market-based rather than aesthetic based. In other words, it is the culture that is most "popular" in an economic sense; i.e., what TV programs receive the most viewers, radio the most listeners, recordings the most buyers,...

Staking her claim: Buffy the Vampire Slayer as transgressive woman warrior.
December 22, 2001... When Susan Faludi published her fiery polemic, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991), she noted the rise of "tough-guy films" and the marginalization or banishment of women from the screen and pointed out that many male...

"Sentimentalized adultery": the film industry's next step in consumerism?
December 22, 2001... Marital infidelity is widespread in every culture. Men and women have evolved with an urge to philander, anthropologists reason, because varying one's sexual partners increases one's probability of producing offspring. (1) Perhaps this is why...

The greatest show on earth: Roman entertainments in turn-of-the-century New York City.
December 22, 2001... September 28 through 30, 1999, marked the centenary of a lavish public spectacle held in New York City to commemorate Admiral Dewey's victory over the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, an event that transformed the United States into an imperial...

Dolls in Japan.
December 22, 2001... In the first episode of the enormously popular Japanese television drama Oshin, the camera focuses on a faded kokeshi doll given to Oshin when she was a child. (1) Though she is now an old woman and the dowager of a prosperous merchant...

Outside-in: body, mind, and self in the advertisement of Aesthetic Surgery.
December 22, 2001... The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) reports a 119% increase from 1997 to 1999 in aesthetic procedures performed in the U.S., to a 1999 total of 4,606,954. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), reporting over...

Red packet: a traditional object in the modern world.
December 22, 2001... Chinese people, particularly those in the southern regions of China, like to give red packets (red envelopes filled with money) to children and young people, both married and unmarried, at Lunar New Year or other holidays (The English-Chinese...

Crime, suicide, and the anti-hero: "Waltzing Matilda" in Australia.
December 22, 2001... For the past 85 years, the song "Waltzing Matilda" has been central to Australian national identity. The hero in the song is a vagabond swagman who steals a sheep and, when confronted by the authorities, commits suicide. While the swagman is...

Censorship: who needs it? How the conventional wisdom restricts information's free flow.
December 22, 2001... The free flow of information depends upon much more than the mere absence of overt censorship, governmental or otherwise. Government suppression, so simple to identify, is only the most obvious and dramatic form of restriction on the...

Circus play, circus talk, and the nostalgia for a total order.
December 22, 2001... Studies of humor and play in general emphasize the creative potential of play activity and play communication in learning and negotiating social reality. These activities and communications are generated and constrained through what Bateson...

Symbolic reconstruction of a Chinese cultural community: an analysis of Jinglong Wang's folk painting "Celebrating a Bumper Harvest".(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2001... Artistically, modern Chinese folk art, an important ingredient of Chinese popular culture, is the creative product of many kinds of traditional folk art such as papercut, embroidery, batik, and so on (Cao 14). Thematically, it is mainly about...

Not begetting the future: technological autochthony, sexual reproduction, and the mythic structure of The Matrix.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2001... Chthonic, Greek for earth, from the Indo-European dhghem, source of the Old English guma, man, as in bridegroom; origin as well of the Latin humus, earth, from whence humus, exhume, humble, humiliate; of the Latin homo, the root of hominid,...

EthniCity: Geographic Perspectives on Ethnic Change in Modern Cities. (Book Reviews).
December 22, 2001... EthniCity: Geographic Perspectives on Ethnic Change in Modern Cities. Curtis Roseman, Hans Dieter Laux, Gunther Thieme, eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996. Recent studies of globalization have emphasized culture clashes and...

Disaster and Memory: Celebrity Culture and the Crisis of Hollywood Cinema. (Book Reviews).
December 22, 2001... Disaster and Memory: Celebrity Culture and the Crisis of Hollywood Cinema. Wheeler Winston Dixon. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 182 pp. Paperback. The author draws upon the death of Princess Diana as the catalyst for the...

Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. (Book Reviews).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. Carole G. Silver. New York: Oxford, 1999. That Victorian England (and the U.S.) suffered a confused society has long been known, though just how confused is only becoming...

The Victorian Underworld. (Book Reviews).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... The Victorian Underworld. Donald Thomas. New York: New York University Press, 1998. All people interested in human deviance, crime and Victorian England needs to own and read this book. It is the very source and interpretation of...

Jazz-Age Boomtown. (Book Review).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... Jazz-Age Boomtown. Jerry L. Rodnitzky and Shirley R. Rodnitzky. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1977. If ever a picture was worth a thousand words, then this photographic picture of the rise of Breckenridge, Texas, during the oil boom...

Media Communication: An Introduction to Theory and Process. (Book Reviews).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... Media Communication: An Introduction to Theory and Process. James Watson. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. Here we are--Yet another "Introduction" to the media world. The shelves of those of us who teach in the area overflow. We know...

The McDonaldization Thesis. (Book Review).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... The McDonaldization Thesis. George Ritzer. Thousand Oaks, CA: The Sage Press, 1998. George Ritzer has staked out his claim on the McDonald gold field for several years. His earlier study, The McDonaldization of Society, come out in 1983,...

Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. (Book Reviews).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. Joe Austin and Michael Willard, eds. New York: New York University Press, 1998. This book is nothing if not audacious: to cover youth cultures and history for...

Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline. (Book Reviews).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline. Lucy Maddox, ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999. The American Studies Association seems always to be a discipline in search of itself and its goals. At its inception the ASA...

Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924. (Book Reviews).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... Music and the Silent Film: Contexts & Case Studies 1895-1924. Martin Miller Marks. New York: Oxford, 1997. This splendidly thorough book takes up a subject which should perhaps be much more interesting and useful to the student of popular...

American Laughter: Immigration, Ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy. (Book Reviews).
December 22, 2001... American Laughter: Immigration, Ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy. Mark Winokur. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. This book is enlightening, and a bit exasperating. Mark Winokur creates a provocative ethnic semiotic for...

Robert Graves and the White Goddess. (Book Reviews).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... Robert Graves and the White Goddess. Richard Perceval Graves. London and North Pomfret, Vermont: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995 (Great Britain) and 1996 (U.S.). The third volume of Richard Perceval Graves's biography of his uncle, Robert...

Conversations with Chaim Potok. (Book Reviews).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... Conversations with Chaim Potok. Daniel Walden. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Daniel Walden, the distinguished scholar of American Jewish literature, has produced an interesting, informative volume of interviews by...

Islands of Women and Amazons: Representations and Realities. (Book Reviews).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... Islands of Women and Amazons: Representations and Realities. Batya Weinbaum. U of Texas Press. 1999. This book is a significant, encyclopedic contribution that is full of information, both theoretical and factual, about the myths told of...

Mexican Style Source Book. (Book Reviews).
December 22, 2001... Mexican Style Source Book. Susan Tomlinson. Singapore: Penplus, 2000.144 pp. This is one of a series of books published by Penplus and lavishly illustrated by the leading architectural photographer, Peter Aprahamian. They attempt to help...