Journal of Popular Culture articles from February 1 2005

Journal of Popular Culture archives from February 1 2005

Editorial: visiting the past's future.(Editorial)
February 1, 2005... IN DIRECTOR WILLIAM CAMERON MENZIES'S FILM THINGS TO COME (1936), which was based on a terrible "novel" (and I use the term generously) by H. G. Wells entitled The Shape of Things to Come, the contemporary viewer is offered a real treat at...

A history of manga in the context of Japanese culture and society.(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... MANGA, OR JAPANESE COMIC ART, IS A HUGE AND LUCRATIVE BUSINESS that is truly popular in Japan. Nowadays, it is also exported to many countries, influencing their popular cultures, children, youth, and the ways of the people. In this article,...

Personal identity in a globalized world: cultural roots of Hindu personal names and surnames.(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... IN AN EARLIER PUBLICATION, I ARGUED THAT THE PROCESS OF GLOBALIZATION has the tendencies of both homogenization and intensification of social and cultural differences (Jayaraman). Some writers have argued that the latter feature of...

"Potential lesbians at two o'clock": the heterosexualization of lesbianism in the recent teen film.(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... IN HER 1995 INTRODUCTION TO IMMORTAL. INVISIBLE: LESBIANS AND THE Moving Image, Tasmin Wilton comments on the invisibility of lesbian sexuality throughout the history of mainstream television and cinema. Beginning with a discussion of early...

Television, Generation X, and Third Wave feminism: a contextual analysis of the Brady Bunch.(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... THERE IS AN OBVIOUS CHRONOLOGICAL CONNECTION BETWEEN Generation X and Third Wave feminism. Neil Howe and Bill Strauss define Generation X as the generation born between 1961 and 1981, while Rob Owen includes only those born between 1965 and...

Working out: consumers and the culture of exercise.
February 1, 2005... NORTH AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE CAN BE CHARACTERIZED BY ITS obsession with fitness and exercise. American consumers spend billions of dollars annually on exercise products (Howell) as diverse as health club memberships, whey supplements, yoga...

From the Big Top to the big leagues: Burt Lancaster's Baseball Odysseys (Oddities?).
February 1, 2005... "If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies... They can ruin you." --Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger) Time is of the essence. This is a highly skilled And beautiful mystery... --Rolfe Humphries, "Polo...

"What's on their plates?" or feeding the hungry mouths: laborers, families, and food in the late twentieth century.
February 1, 2005... Introduction FROM THE FAMILIAR CAMPBELL'S SOUP TO ERNEST MATTHEW MICKLER'S White Trash Cooking, this investigation looks closely at the ways that class and food/eating collide in American society and in popular culture. It is also...

Jambands: The Complete Guide to the Players, Music & Scene.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Jambands: The Complete Guide to the Players, Music & Scene. Dean Budnick. San Francisco: Backbeat, 2003. Dean Budnick, the cultural historian, magazine editor, and radio DJ responsible for creating the Web site http://www.jambands.com and...

The Warrior Women of Television: A Feminist Cultural Analysis of the New Female Body in Popular Media.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... The Warrior Women of Television: A Feminist Cultural Analysis of the New Female Body in Popular Media. Dawn Heinecken. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. In the past decade, there has been a remarkable increase in the popularity of films and...

Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. Ed. Greg Tate. New York: Harlem Moon/Broadway Books, 2003. If the great problem of the twentieth century has been the problem of the color line, then a century...

Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars. Joel Dinerstein. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Joel Dinerstein, who teaches English at Ithaca College in New York,...

Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real. Ed. James Friedman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Reality television demands our attention. As reality programming floods the networks and the first all-reality...

Dreams & Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Dreams & Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film. Jack Shadoian. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. We can now read the second edition (the subtitle has been changed from the 1977 edition's The American Gangster/Crime Film) of one of...

Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture. Ed. Sherrie A. Inness. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. The ten essays in this fine collection examine portrayals of the female action hero in contemporary comics, toys,...

The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I Am.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I Am. Ed. Richard Greene and Peter Vernezze. Chicago: Open Court, 2004. The long-running HBO series The Sopranos inspired the latest volume from Open Court's Popular Culture and Philosophy...

Picturing Extraterrestrials: Alien Images in Modern Mass Culture.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Picturing Extraterrestrials: Alien Images in Modern Mass Culture. John F. Moffitt. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press, 2003. It is rare in academia to discover an author who writes with passion and humor. John F. Moffitt, a professor emeritus...

Word Spy: The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Word Spy: The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture. Paul McFedries. New York: Broadway Books, 2004. As I write this, Senator John F. Kerry--the Democratic Party's Seabiscut candidate--is poised to compete against George W. Bush in the...

The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties. J. Hoberman. New York: The New Press, 2003. In J. Hoberman's cultural history of the 1960s, the movies do more than reflect the dissonant currents in American life; they...

G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. Katherine Frank. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Katherine Frank, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at the College of the Atlantic, has produced an...

Watching M*A*S*H, Watching America: A Social History of the 1972-1983 Television Series.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Watching M*A*S*H, Watching America: A Social History of the 1972-1983 Television Series. James H. Wittebols. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2003. The question of whether the mass media drive or reflect popular culture is something...

A Field Guide to Sprawl.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... A Field Guide to Sprawl. Dolores Hayden. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. A Field Guide to Sprawl is one of those rare books that is much deeper than it appears on the surface. Dolores Hayden, who teaches architecture and American studies...

Hey Waitress!: The USA from the Other Side of the Tray.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Hey Waitress!: The USA from the Other Side of the Tray. Alison Owings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Alison Owings's fine book is based on a series of interviews with waitresses from all over the United States. This book...

American Humor: A Study of the National Character.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Constance Rourke. New York: New York Review Books, 2004. This book is a new edition of Constance Rourke's 1931 masterpiece, American Humor: A Study of the National Character. The best...