Journal of Popular Culture articles from September 2002

Journal of Popular Culture archives from September 2002

Have you been injured? The current state of personal injury lawyers' advertising.
September 22, 2002... As part of the professionalization of the legal field that began in the late nineteenth century, nearly every state licensing authority enacted prohibitions against lawyers' advertising, arguing that advertising demeaned the profession and...

Reconstructing reality: conspiracy theories about Jonestown.
September 22, 2002... As I was describing this article to a colleague during a taxicab ride at a conference, I noticed that our driver was listening intently. When we got out of the cab, I asked him what he thought. He said it was "interesting." Coincidentally or...

"You even forget yourself": The cinematic construction of anorexic women in the 1990s Austen films.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... Jane Austen critics have debated the relative feminism of the author, her characters, and her plots since long before feminism became customary discourse for literary conversation. (1) The 1990s rash of Austenian film adaptations revived this...

Joining the Pezzimist Party: Pez convention as rite of passage & communal bonding.
September 22, 2002... The growing popularity of Pez dispensers amazes even collectors. Originally fashioned as a breath freshener for adults by Austrian Eduard Haas in the 1940s, Pez takes its name from the German word for peppermint--pfefferminz (Mittelbach 36)....

The killers inside them: the schizophrenic protagonist in John Franklin Bardin's Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly and Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... "All I can do is wait until I split. Right down the middle." --Sheriff Lou Ford, in Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. "The world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness."...

The American nudist movement: from cooperative to capital, the song remains the same.
September 22, 2002... Introduction In 1927, an American named Maurice Parmelee published The New Gymnosophy in London (it was later published as Nudism in Modern Life in the United States). Parmelee advocated nudism (or gymnosophy) as a means for beautifying...

Pit bull panic.(media coverage of a dog breed)
September 22, 2002... The news media has long been criticized for being sensationalist as well as biased. One ongoing story that the media has offered their audience is a melodrama regarding the American Pit Bull Terrier (hereafter referred to as "Pit Bull"). The...

Aliens and Indians: a comparison of abduction and captivity narratives.
September 22, 2002... Stories of captivity among North American Indians dating from the 17th century in many ways parallel the more recent narratives of alien abduction. Telling a story inevitably involves elements of selection, and in both Indian captivity...

Nostalgia, comic books, & the "War Against Crime!" an inquiry into the resurgence of popular justice.
September 22, 2002... "Such trivia as comic books..." Frederic Wertham Lady Justice represents a figure from our not-too-distant past. Like a memory of an old schoolyard friend that we can vaguely retrieve, she exists deep within our psyche. Periodically,...

NASCAR racing fans: cranking up an empirical approach.
September 22, 2002... The death of Dale Earnhardt on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500 brought unprecedented media attention to NASCAR fans. Media sources showed fans gathered at racetracks, churches, and other memorial services where they prayed, cried, and...

The modern jeremiad: Bloom, Bennett, and Bork on American decline.(Allan Bloom, William Bennett, Robert Bork)
September 22, 2002... One of the more interesting phenomena seen in recent American politics has been the tendency of certain secular conservatives to look for evidence of decline. While the conservative political agenda dominates political discourse, certain...

Oh dad poor dad, your daughter has looked in your closet and I'm feeling so sad: daughters dissing Daddy in the memoir *.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... In the past decade there has been an explosion of sociological research on fathers. Today the academic research and media stories on deadbeat dads and fatherlessness either blame fathers for their children's problems or warn of catastrophe if...