scholarly journals Popular Culture as Educational Space – Depictions of a Utopia in Pop Culture Texts

2018 ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Witold Jakubowski
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Children And Youth ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Old World ◽  
Popular Art ◽  
Perfect Order ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Educational Potential

The aim of the text is to discuss the educational potential of popular culture. The firstpart focuses on theoretical opinions on the relationships of culture and education. Pedagogical thinking about culture is dominated by its humanistic understanding, in which a special sense of culture has been understood as one of the top of human achievement. In traditional pedagogical reflection,there is noticeable concentration on culture as “valuable for educational interactions”. In such a perspective, the space of popular culture is ignored. Perceived as a bad Mr. Hyde of cultural space, it is treated as an area of threats to the development of children and youth. But culture is not only a canon of the achievements of past generations. In the anthropological sense, these are simply the ways of living a life in a society. Popular culture is the space where various aspects are commented on. Popular art plays a special role here.The second part discusses the pop cultural texts that illustrate the characteristic elements of utopia: burial of the “old world”, establishing a “perfect” order, protection against external destruction and against destruction from inside. Formed at different times and based on different means of expression, they address the dilemmas associated with thinking about a “better world”. They present the mechanisms and consequences of building a new society “with their own language”.

History Has Its Eyes on You

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Maslon
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Technological Advance ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
Personal Preference ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Consumer Habits

A generational change at the beginning of the twenty-first century intersected with the technological advance of the Internet to provide a renaissance of Broadway music in popular culture. Downloading playlists allowed the home listener to become, in essence, his/her own record producer; length, narrative, performer were now all in the hands of the consumer’s personal preference. Following in the footsteps of Rent (as a favorite of a younger demographic), Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton emerged as the greatest pop culture/Broadway musical phenomenon of the twenty-first century; its cast album and cover recording shot up near the top of music’s pop charts. A rediscovery of the power of Broadway’s music to transform listening and consumer habits seems imminent with the addition of Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen to a devoted fan base—and beyond.

“Stealing Stuff Is about the Stuff, not the Stealing”: Rick and Morty and Narrative Instability

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-94
Author(s):  
Łukasz Muniowski
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Video Games ◽  
The Third ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
Cultural Texts

Rick and Morty, one of the most popular presently-airing American TV series, is deeply rooted in popular culture. Each episode is full of allusions and references to other cultural texts, accentuating the show’s own status as a pop cultural text. This article analyzes the third episode of the fourth season of Rick and Morty, “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty,” using Stefan Schubert’s concept of narrative instability. The episode mocks twist films by introducing a ridiculous number of twists, eventually making the viewer immune to the element of surprise usually brought on by what Schubert understands as unstable moments. In doing so, the episode also emphasizes the overuse of that narrative device in recent decades in films, TV series and video games. “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty” deconstructs twist films while sticking to the rules of the sub-genre and remaining entertaining in its own right. Instability can pose quite a problem for the showrunners, who usually have to adjust to the norms of serialized storytelling. By using Schubert’s theory of narrative instability to discuss a singular episode of a series, I hope to demonstrate the extent to which this quality has permeated modern storytelling. The episode highlights the effects of over-reliance on narrative instability as a tool, as even the most elaborate form is not enough to make up for the lack of essence. This is exactly what Rick criticizes in the episode, when he states: “stealing stuff is about the stuff, not the stealing.”

scholarly journals The Influence Of Popular Culture On The Visual Music Album Cover

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Citra Kemala Putri
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Popular Art ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
The Aesthetic

Mass culture and popular culture is one of the important phenomena that was born after the postmodern era. In a society that lives in the midst of mass culture and popular culture, will grow consumer communities that produce new cultural symbols and activities. This discourse then influenced various aspects, for example, the emergence of popular music and popular art movements which soon became a commodities that was consumed by many youth people. This study discusses the influence of popular culture on the visuals of music album covers which take several album covers of international musicians from different time periods as samples to compare the similarities or friction caused by various art developments as their response toward happening trends. This study uses qualitative method. This study of various visual images was considering the aesthetic idioms of postmodernism, including Pastiche, Parody, Kitsch, Camp and Schizophrenia, as well as the concepts of several art movements, such as Pop Art and Lowbrow Art. The final result of this study reveal that several music albums using the Pop Art and Lowbrow Art style contained postmodern aesthetic idioms. Each album cover can contain one or several aesthetic idioms simultaneously.

scholarly journals American war movies. David Ayer’s Fury as mythologisation of war and soldiers

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Marcin Kępiński
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Traditional Culture ◽  
Symbolic Language ◽  
War Films ◽  
Hollywood Cinema

Both pop culture and modern Hollywood cinema are mainly intended for entertainment. American war films are not free from this vice. A researcher of culture should shun attempts to find hidden symbols, myths and flashes of meanings from distant traditional culture in such films. Contemporary popular mythologies do not represent the same mythical pattern that Eliade wrote about. Popular culture consists of ideas on various topics, borrowings, quotations and fragments of meanings, all patched together. In my view, however, Fury goes beyond pop culture and entertainment. After all, there is also good American war cinema and films that are not mindless borrowings or calques of carelessly patchworked pieces of pop culture. One can look at them and find certain cultural tropes and motifs known to specialists in humanities, such as an initiation journey, the symbolic language of eternal myths or archetypal figures of cultural heroes, all in a version transformed by popular culture, of course. The aim of my article is therefore to analyse David Ayer’s film from the perspective of a culture researcher who seeks cultural tropes and sources of the war hero myth in this cinematic work.

scholarly journals Repackaging Popular Culture: Commentary and Critique in Community

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tully Barnett ◽  
Ben Kooyman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nerd Culture ◽  
The Big Bang

Contemporaneous with the collision of Science Fiction/Fantasy with the mainstream evident in the success of nerd culture show The Big Bang Theory (2007- ), Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (2012), the growth of Comic Con audiences and so on, Dan Harmon developed Community (2009- ), a sitcom depicting a study group at a second-rate community college. The show exemplifies a recent gravitation away from the multi-camera, laugh-track driven sitcom formula, alternating between “straight” episodes dealing with traditional sitcom premises, though always inflected with self-aware acumen, and more ambitious, unconventional episodes featuring outlandish premises, often infused with the trappings of genre and geek fandom. The show presents apocalyptic action- and Western-style paintball wars, epidemics that evoke zombie cinema, a Yahtzee game that spirals into alternate timelines, and a high-stakes Dungeons and Dragons game that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy.  Both the straight and the unconventional episodes ultimately serve the same purpose, examining the intersection between nerd culture and everyday life. This essay discusses a number of episodes which exemplify Community’s intersections between everyday life and popular culture, charting the show’s evolving preoccupation with pop culture and intertwining of reality and fantasy. It discusses Community’s self-referentiality as a sitcom, its ambitious and elaborate recreations of and homages to pop culture artefacts, and its explicit gravitation towards Science Fiction and Telefantasy in its third season. Through its various homages to popular culture and ongoing depiction of fan culture, we posit that the show is both a work of fandom and a work about fandom, advocating for the pivotal role of fandom in everyday life and for popular culture as a tool for interpreting, comprehending and navigating life. In this respect, the show contributes to the long history of both the sitcom and Telefantasy as vehicles for cultural commentary.

TV Series in Turkish Foreign Policy: Aspects of Hegemony and Resistance

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantinos Constantinou ◽  
Zenonas Tziarras
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Soap Operas ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Turkish Foreign Policy ◽  
The World ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
The Impact

This article examines the ways in which (pop or) popular culture may fall within the context of foreign policy. More specifically, it situates our analysis against such backdrop by delving into how Turkey effectively exports pop culture, propaganda and positive images of itself via the use of television (TV) shows. To that end, notable Turkish soap operas market its ancient glorious past. Admittedly, these telenovelas form a salient cultural product export for Turkey as they reach diverse and far-away audiences – from Latin America to Russia, Central Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans, to merely name a few. Paradoxically, the frenzy has even reached places like Greece. Not to mention, Serbia or Israel, with the latter’s phenomenal success accompanied also with some backlash. Therefore, the current study seeks to better understand the magnitude alongside the impact of Turkey’s achievement given how it comprises a multi-million-dollar industry, by partially unearthing what makes Turkish TV series so powerful the world over. Further, this research firstly presents an analysis of the hegemonic efforts before presenting the limitations to its success by thoroughly covering the empirical data while, theoretically framing it.  

scholarly journals Visual Semiotics and Real Events

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inna Semetsky
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Visual Semiotics ◽  
Semiotic Systems ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Dynamic Relations ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Critical Reason

This article adopts a semiotic (and edusemiotic) perspective that abolishes all binary divisions in favour of the process of semiosis that ensures a continuous translation of signs into other signs via the dynamic relations formed by the human mind, cultural artefacts, and events in real life. The mind, in edusemiotics, partakes of unconscious ideas in the form of mental images. As for culture, the field of communication phenomena calls for, according to Yuri Lotman, the identification of specific semiotic systems representing their ‘languages’, including non-verbal signs such as images, pictures, and other art forms that function as cultural texts. The methodology of bricolage (conceptualized in educational research by Joe Kincheloe) combines hermeneutics with narratology, and ‘reading’ images becomes imperative for advancing critical pedagogy. The article examines and interprets selected images, including those belonging to the low end of popular culture, and connects them with the exemplarily significant event at the level of socio-cultural reality.The paradoxical self-referential ‘logic’ is the prerogative of semiotic reason that constantly reflects on – thus bringing to cognition and transforming – our often unconscious assumptions, beliefs and habits thus contributing to the construction of subjectivity that uses critical reason informed by signs, which include the bricolage of images.

Gesture, Pop Culture, and Intertextuality in the Work of Lea Anderson

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (50) ◽  
pp. 155-160
Author(s):  
Sherril Dodds ◽  
Janet Adshead-Lansdale
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Female Group ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Analysis Theory ◽  
The University ◽  
Head Of Department ◽  
Television Image

Lea Anderson is one of the leading choreographers to have emerged over the past decade, her most characteristic work having been with the all-female group she co-founded, the Cholmondeleys, and its all-male counterpart, the Featherstonehaughs. This article explores the distinctively intertextual elements in Lea Anderson's work – elements which, the authors suggest, make it at once accessible, distinctive, and distinctively postmodern. Sherril Dodds addressed the relationships between postmodernism and popular culture in Anderson's work, with particular focus on the television image and the dance image, in her MA dissertation for the Department of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey, where she is currently a research student. Her co-author, Janet Adshead-Lansdale, is Head of Department at Surrey, and has also edited Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice (1988) and co-edited Dance History: an Introduction (1994).

scholarly journals The Currency of Fantasy: Discourses of Popular Culture in International Relations

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Ningchuan Wang
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Ir Studies ◽  
International Issues ◽  
Fictional Representations

The “facts” of international politics constitute the first-order representations of political life and can be reflected in popular entertainment as second-order or fictional representations. This article demonstrates that discourses of popular culture are powerful and implicated in International Relations (IR) studies. The article makes two correlated claims: the first is that the humanist and anthropological methodology often used to analyse pop culture could also be used to analyse international issues, if appropriately contextualized; the second claim is that a nation can manifest its ‘discourse’ in international politics via its popular culture, as soft power.

scholarly journals Budaya Populer Dalam Pertunjukkan Reyog Obyogan

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jurnal ARISTO
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Folk Art ◽  
Community Environment ◽  
Patterns Of Communication ◽  
Musical Accompaniment ◽  
Lifestyle Patterns

Pop culture is often associated with a community environment with certain characteristics such as beliefs, rituals, performances, form shows, lifestyle patterns, symbols, language, dress, music, dance, and various models form of human expression, intellectual, and how to communicate in a order a certain time.In Reyog Obyogan performances, pop culture can we find is the traditional musical accompaniment or wasps that incorporate elements of today's popular such as dangdut songs. Not only that, the dancers jathil freely change and adjust according to the demand of the audience or trends that are favored in society. Seeing this paradigm and development, the focus in this research is to look further and in-depth how a popular culture trending affect community shape in a staging performances Reyog Ponorogo in Obyogan form.It also affects the patterns of communication, the message and meaning contained within the show itself. Result of this study showed several behaviors in Reyog Obyogan performances influences to a popular culture that were hits in the present like a concept similar to the dance Edreg Jaipong. Saweran also started a lot in the form of performances Reyog. Song or “Gending” in reyog also changing from songs like 'walang kekek” being “oplosan”' or 'kanggo riko' which is present in vogue in society. The costumes also changed with the entry of sensual especially against Jathil dancers are semi-transparent clothing similar to the Kebaya and colorful. The conclusion of this study prove that folk art as a tradisional performance be affected things that are popular in the community at large at the time.

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