Peter Benes. For a Short Time Only: Itinerants and the Resurgence of Popular Culture in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. 528 pp.; 134 black-and-white illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95.

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 176-177
Author(s):  
Naomi J. Stubbs
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 49-58
Author(s):  
Sylwia Czachór

Generational differences in artistic representations of the experience of totalitarian past in the new Czech theatre. The article presents an analysis of a number of Czech performances from the years 2007–2013 on the topic of the communist era and reflecting on the changes that have occurred over the past 25 years. Selected directors belong to three generations of artists: the ones already creating in the 1960s, the ones debuting just before or just after the Velvet Revolution and the ones beginning their career in 2000. The comparison of performances produced within a short time clearly shows the differences, both aesthetic and ideological, in the method of recognizing similar issues by the authors growing up in a completely different socio-political conditions. Works of the oldest generation, using conventional theatrical means, reveal the strongest judgmental tendencies, the need to show the ambiguous choices in black and white colors. The average generation contend with the legend of past years, asking difficult questions about the impact of the past on the shape of collective identity. The youngest generation, however, intentionally emphasize that their knowledge about communism is mediated, which encourages them to analyze the history and memory of their families in search of their own roots.Generační rozdíly v uměleckém zobrazování zkušenosti totalitární minulosti v nejnovějším českém divadle. Příspěvek obsahuje analýzu několika českých představení z let 2007–2013, jejichž tématem se stalo období komunismu a reflexe nad proměnami posledních 25 let. Vybraní režiséři patří ke třem generacím umělců:  jedni inscenovali dlouho před rokem 1989, druzí debutovali krátce po sametové revoluci, zatímco třetí zahájili kariéru v roce 2000. Soubor představení vzniklých v malém časovém rozpětí výrazně ukazuje jak estetické, tak světonázorové rozdíly ve způsobu uchopení podobné tematiky autory, kteří vyrůstali ve zcela odlišných společensko-politických podmínkách. Díla nejstarší generace pomocí konvenčních divadelních prostředků projevují nejsilnější tendence posuzovat a odsuzovat, nutnost ukázat nejednoznačné volby v černo-bílých barvách. Střední generace se poměřuje s legendami mi­nulých dob, pokládá obtížné otázky po vlivu minulosti na podobu kolektivní identity. Nejmladší tvůrci pak vědomě zdůrazňují, že jejich znalost komunismu je zprostředkovaná, což je vede k analyzování historie a rodinné paměti při hledání vlastních kořenů.  


First Monday ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Bogost

Videogames have dominated popular culture for some time, but only in 2004 did they make a significant break into the world of politics, advocacy, and activism. This paper provides an overview of a variety of types of games used for political speech, from endorsed party messages to activist dissent. After explaining the state of the field, I discuss approaches to design and measure success for such artifacts. While some political opinion is black and white, most issues occupy grey areas, heavily influenced by other public policy issues. Can healthcare reform really be separated from taxation, national budgeting, tort reform, and social security reform? Far from neatly isolated problems, policy issues are complex systems that recombine and interrelate with one another. In particular, I will interrogate how videogames afford a new perspective on political issues, since they are especially effective at representing complex systems. Central to the process of creating and understanding such games is an understanding of “procedural rhetoric” — the way that a videogame embodies ideology in its computational structure. By understanding how games express rhetoric in their rules, we not only gain a critical vantage point on videogame artifacts, but also we can begin to consider how to design games whose primary purpose is to editorialize, teach, and make political statements.


2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-104
Author(s):  
Jinseok Seo

Vytautas Magnus UniversityKorea, with insufficient natural resources and a limited consumer market, began to take notice of the cultural content industry in the 21st century. This means that the cultivation of this industry has not taken place for a long time compared to Japan, the USA or Hong Kong. Yet Korea has obtained an astonishing outcome in a short time. The popular culture of South Korea, with the appellation of hallyu, boasted of an enormous strength initially in the Asian market and subsequently stretched to markets in other countries, too. Seeing that Korean cultural archetypes do not play a successful role in the cultural content business of Korea in general, the position of shamanism is truly trivial among the others. I would like to analyse and discuss the meaning, function and potential of Korean shamanism in the field of the Korean cultural content industry.


Author(s):  
Robin Briggs

Popular religion, along with the wider field of popular culture, has only been a recognized subject for historical investigation for a relatively short time; the bibliography is virtually non-existent before 1970. Even so, a term that was at first accepted as comprehensible and useful has rapidly come to be seen as highly problematic. Among the multiple reasons for concern, two in particular stand out. Historians now recoil from any suggestion that there was a single or coherent phenomenon that could be labelled in this way, while detailed research has largely destroyed the notion of a clear frontier between “official” and “popular” beliefs and practices. These discussions have been particularly lively in the case of France, where the nature of religious change under the Ancien Régime raises important issues with wide relevance, and the documentation is unusually rich.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Lynne Vallone

Children's literature criticism has been enhanced by classic and recent work that considers and analyses the important roles children play in performance, but there is a gap in current scholarship on drama as children's literature. This gap concerns how the place of children – especially girls and notions of girlhood – has changed over time in texts and cultural productions around the traditions of recitation and minstrelsy.1Robin Bernstein has argued persuasively that the ‘scripts’ of a racist past inform the cultural constructions of the present and that children's material and popular culture is often its repository: ‘Sentimentalism or minstrelsy may have peaked in the lives of adults in the nineteenth century, but the popular cultures of childhood … delivered, in fragmented and distorted forms, the images, practices, and ideologies of sentimentalism and minstrelsy well into the twentieth century’ (7). This essay attempts to bridge this gap in scholarship by investigating late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American black and white girlhood through readings of recitation pieces and playtexts, important aspects of children's literary culture, broadly conceived


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