scholarly journals Bläckfiskar

Budkavlen ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 99 ◽  
pp. 11-33
Author(s):  
Lars Kaijser
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Flagship Species ◽  
Important Resource ◽  
Equal Importance ◽  
Gift Shop ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Scientific Facts ◽  
Selection Of

Cephalopods. On staged animals and popular science conventions at public aquariums. Lars Kaijser Keywords: Aquarium, cephalopod, popular science   The article discusses the way animals are portrayed in popular science, using cephalopods at public aquariums as the basis. Public aquariums tend to display a set of animals that could be described as flagship species. These are animals reoccurring as live examples in tanks, used in marketing and sold as toys in the gift shop. Often, the presentations of these animals are enhanced with scientific facts that are combined with popular cultural stories and well-known iconographies. Together they form what could be labelled as popular science animals, easily recognisable animals with charismatic features. At aquariums, this generally refers to sharks, jellyfish, penguins, frogs or clownfish. The focus is on the biology of the animals, but equal importance is placed on the stories and popular-cultural association frameworks. The popular science animal is comprised of elements from different domains of knowledge, ranging from biology and cultural history to folklore and popular culture. These insights can be contradictory, and one important feature of presentations at aquariums is the endeavour to distinguish between fact and myth. At the same time, the myth is an important resource when curating exhibits and attracting attention. It is part of the convention that the selection of knowledge is not only chosen to inform people about animals but also to entertain and surprise them. The cephalopod is at the crossroad of research and imagination, viewed as enigmatic, fascinating, and fearful. It is characterised as smart, a superhero and a marker for both discoveries and knowledge gaps. The cephalopod, especially the octopus, is an animal that in many ways represents modernity.

The Art of Love Poetry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gray
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Meaning And Function ◽  
Comprehensive History

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.

Our Mutual Friend

2018 ◽  
pp. 284-298
Author(s):  
Ian Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Savage Mind ◽  
Mutual Friend

This chapter situates Our Mutual Friend at the intersection of nineteenth-century projects of culture: the antiquarian, pedagogical, and anthropological. Silas Wegg and the doll’s dressmaker, Jenny Wren, represent competing versions of the novel’s imaginative sources in popular culture, attached to successive historical stages. Wegg is a corrupt avatar of the Romantic ballad revival, with its commitments to antiquarian nationalism and a degenerationist cultural history. Jenny personifies a communal heritage of folktales, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes, absorbed organically in childhood, anticipating the anthropological claim on these materials, in the decades after Dickens’s death, as relics of a universal ‘savage mind’. Our Mutual Friend resists both programmes, the anthropological as well as the antiquarian, in counterpoint to its well-studied critique of the acquisition of culture through formal schooling.

Culture and the popular: Introduction to essays in memory of Brian Rigby

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 293-299
Author(s):  
Michael Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk ◽  
French Cultural Studies

This article introduces the special number of French Cultural Studies commemorating the role of Brian Rigby as the journal’s first Managing Editor. It situates his contribution in the emergence of cultural history and French cultural studies during the rapid expansion of higher education from the 1960s in France, the UK, the US and other countries. It suggests that these new areas of study saw cultural activities in a broader social context and opened the way to a wider understanding of culture, in which popular culture played an increasingly important part. It argues that the study of popular culture can illuminate some of the most mundane experiences of everyday life, and some of the most challenging. It can also help to understand the rapidly changing cultural environment in which our daily lives are now conducted.

scholarly journals Et Tu Ru? Entrepreneurship and the Commodification of Drag in RuPaul’s Drag Race

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Buck
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Reality Tv ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Drag Queen ◽  
The Face ◽  
Value Changes ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Tv Show ◽  
International Success ◽  
Selection Of

Historically, drag is a taboo which has been marginalized in the face of centuries of repression against non-heteronormative activity. Yet today drag has become highly visible in popular culture, and this is in large part attributable to the international success of American reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-present). Its bold representation of drag on a mainstream television show is unprecedented and the selection of drag queen competitors by the show’s producers has demonstrated a plethora of representations as Drag Race showcases a diverse range of identifications from the world of drag performance. The blossoming of Drag Race’s success comes at a historical moment in which we are seeing a huge proliferation of queer representations (re)produced in US television and other media over the last decade. However, as I will argue, the apparent liberalization of drag queens in popular culture is not simply a celebration of so-called ‘progress’ in the recognition of the marginalized, but may also be prompting the promotion of other value changes within late capitalism’s ideals of consumerism and entrepreneurship. Contestants are increasingly pressured to construct their drag performances to conform to a recognizable brand to reach the heights of their own private ‘success’. Mainstreamed depictions of queer subjects are susceptible to co-option, particularly in televisual forms such as Drag Race which prospers by channelling the emancipatory and subversive desires of the subculture. Through trans-textual considerations and historical contextualizations, I show how the representation of drag in Drag Race is depoliticized through neoliberal discourse as the show’s continual demand for competitors to ‘work it’ privileges and maintains the impetus for competitive profitmaking above the needs and demands of disempowered groups.

Vivre Ici

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison J. Murray Levine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Being There ◽  
Selection Of

Vivre Ici analyzes a selection of films from the vast viewing landscape of contemporary French documentary film, a genre that has experienced a renaissance in the past twenty years. The films are connected not just by a general interest in engaging the “real,” but by a particular attention to French space and place. From farms and wild places to roads, schools, and urban edgelands, these films explore the spaces of the everyday and the human and non-human experiences that unfold within them. Through a critical approach that integrates phenomenology, film theory, eco-criticism and cultural history, Levine investigates the notion of documentary as experience. She asks how and why, in the contemporary media landscape, these films seek to avoid argumentation and instead, give the viewer a feeling of “being there.” As a diverse collection of filmmakers, both well-known and less so, explore the limits and possibilities of these places, a collage-like, incomplete, and fragmented vision of France as seen and felt through documentary cameras comes into view. Venturing beyond film analysis to examine the production climate for these films and their circulation in contemporary France, Levine explores the social and political consequences of these “films that matter” for the viewers who come into contact with them.

Fictional German governesses in Edwardian popular culture: English responses to German militarism and modernity

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Bayley
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
Selection Of

Historians have tended to focus on propaganda when assessing Edwardian attitudes towards Germans, but a shift of focus to fiction reveals a rather different picture. Whereas propaganda created the cliché of ‘the Hun’, fiction produced non- and even counter-stereotypical figures of Germans. An analysis of German governess characters in a selection of short stories, performances, novels, and cartoons indicates that the Edwardian image of Germans was not purely negative but ambivalent and multifarious. Imagined German governesses appeared as patriots and spies, pacifists and warmongers, spinsters and seducers, victims and evil-doers. A close look at characterisations by Saki [H. H. Munro], M. E. Francis [Margaret Blundell], Dorothy Richardson, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Frank Hart and others reveals not only their variety but also their metaphorical use as responses to Germany’s aggressive militarism and avant-garde modernity. Each governess figure conveyed a positive, negative or ambivalent message about the potential impact of German militarism and modernity on England and Englishness. The aggregate image of German governesses, and by inference Germans, was therefore equivocal and demonstrates the mixed feelings of Edwardians toward their ‘cousin’ country.

A Walk through the Creation Museum

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-62
Author(s):  
Kathleen C. Oberlin
Keyword(s):  
Gift Shop ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Creation

When visitors enter the Creation Museum they wait in line to buy tickets and walk through exhibits in a museum that is 70,000 square feet and counting. To guide the reader, this walk through provides an overview of Answers in Genesis’ core arguments on display at the Creation Museum and provides a layout of the museum that will be revisited in more detail in subsequent chapters: the exhibits, the private headquarters, the gift shop, the cafes, and the outdoor grounds.

The development of resistance to metachloridine inPlasmodium gallinaceumin Chicks

Parasitology ◽  
1953 ◽  
Vol 42 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 277-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Bishop ◽  
Elspeth W. McConnachie
Keyword(s):  
Growth Rate ◽  
Drug Resistance ◽  
Normal Population ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Cross Resistance ◽  
Development Of Resistance ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Higher Doses ◽  
Resistance Tests ◽  
Selection Of

1. An increase in resistance to metachloridine of more than 100-fold was obtained within a few weeks in a strain ofPlasmodium gallinaceumtreated with gradually increasing doses of the drug and maintained in young chicks by blood-inoculation at intervals of 2–3 days.2. There was no evidence that the rapid development of resistance arose by the selection of highly resistant individuals present in the normal population.3. Two strains ofP. gallinaceumpassaged through chicks treated with 0·025 mg. doses of the drug gradually became resistant to greater concentrations than that to which they had been exposed, though their growth rate decreased when they were inoculated into birds receiving higher doses of the drug.4. In both strains maintained in birds treated with 0·025 mg. doses of the drug, resistance reached a maximum beyond which it did not increase.5. Cross-resistance tests failed to show any relationship in mode of action between meta-chloridine and pamaquin, mepacrine, quinine or chloroquine. A strain ofP. gallinaceum, highly resistant to metachloridine, showed slight resistance to sulphadiazine, sulphapyridine and sulphathiazole, but none to sulphanilamide or proguanil.We are indebted to the Cyanamid Products Ltd., London, for the gift of the Folvite used in these experiments.

Consumer Culture and Appropriation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen T. Dunagan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Television Advertising ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Race Ethnicity

Chapter Four examines how advertising engages dance in the promotion of hegemonic ideological notions of social identity (i.e., categories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality), while simultaneously promoting difference and responding to contemporary developments. It looks closely at how advertising reveals cultural ambivalence and relies on nostalgia without memory to allow consumers to (re)construct a shared cultural history. In a similar way, dance in television advertising serves as a tool for reinforcing neoliberal economic and social theory. This chapter examines a range of ads that demonstrate dance-in-advertising’s relation to hegemony and its simultaneous promotion of developments in cultural knowledge and participatory aesthetics. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the ads function as spaces of intersection where affect meets ideologies, revealing how advertising reflects, informs, and responds to popular culture, mass media, and consumerism.

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