Bøger i Cultural Studies serien

What do "raves" have to do with eighteenth-century Romanticism, or the latest communication technologies with historical ideas about language, media, and culture? Today''s culture dazzles us with technological marvels and media spectacles. While we find them entertaining, just as often they are troubling -- they seem to contradict common sense, eliciting such questions as What is real? or What is reality? and What is language? or What does language do? These questions, once confined to scholars, have become everyone''s concern. Some of the best answers might be found in an unexpected source: Romanticism. Too often we bring the values of the Enlightenment, particularly that of reason, to critique phenomena not inherently rational, such as pop culture or the Internet. This means that much criticism of current culture already has an intellectual foundation antagonistic to it -- inviting postmodern arguments that suggest history has ended and reality is an illusion. In contrast, Romanticism, a cultural movement founded in Germany and England during the late eighteenth century, offers us an archive of concepts surprisingly sensitive to these problems. The Romantics were poets, dreamers, and politicians who advanced ideas that anticipated much contemporary thinking. David Black has organized these ideas systematically, and has then applied them to key issues in communications, such as representation, audience, and the information society, as well as to significant debates in cultural studies. As a result, The Politics of Enchantment offers a new theory of media and culture that is grounded in intellectual history, yet as feverishly current as the latest digital device.

Until recently still a blank spot on the world map of art, China today occupies one of the top positions in the rankings of the global art market and has moved into the center of the speculations and the covetousness of its protagonists. But what is really happening on the spot, beyond the ethnocentric distortions of the Western viewpoint? What social representations and uses of art can be identified?A research team from the University of St. Gallen has taken up such questions in an ethnographical field research project which enables the actors in this emergent and nonetheless already market-dominated art field to have their say.

What is nostalgia in television? How far does a nostalgic text trigger nostalgic emotions? And how are nostalgic series received by different audience groups?Stefanie Armbruster uses an interdisciplinary approach as analytical and theoretical basis. Her detailed analyses identify nostalgia in reruns, remakes and period dramas such as "e;Knight Rider"e; or "e;Mad Men"e;. Focus group discussions with German and Spanish viewers give new insights into its reception.The in-depth study helps to understand the interrelation of nostalgic texts and nostalgic reception better and explores a decisive part of a phenomenon that is omnipresent in our current TV landscape.

Geographies of Love is the first study to explore the cultural lifeworlds of British, Australian and Indian chick- and ladlit characters. Offering unique case studies including Bridget Jones's Diary, About a Boy and Almost Single, the book explores how women and men search for love and how they commit themselves to romances in specific spaces and places: the home and the office as well as shops, clubs and bars.This cross-disciplinary study provides scholars, students and keen readers with multiple points of access and easily-relatable situations. It applies the complex phenomenon of cultural geographies within the field of literary studies and sheds new light on a most passionate feeling.

Based on a study of V. S. Naipaul's postcolonial writings, this book explores the process of postcolonial subjects' special route of identification. This enables the readers to see how in our increasingly diverse and fragmented post-modern world, identity is a vibrant, complex, and highly controversial concept. The old notion of identity as a prescribed and self-sufficient entity is now replaced by identity as a plural, floating and becoming process. Min Zhou shows how postcolonial literature, among other artistic forms, is one of the most representative reflections of this floating identity.

Despite a number of retrospective works on cultural studies, to date no other book dedicates itself to the historical and theoretical examination of British cultural studies' engagement with the active audience theory of the Birmingham School and its legacies.However, this book is no mere reconstruction of active audience theory as Huimin Jin develops new theoretical insights initially through a critical review of Stuart Hall's classical model of encoding/decoding and close readings of David Morley's groundbreaking ethnographic audience studies. Questioning the discourse model of the active audience proposed by Hall and Morley, Jin elaborates a new materialistic concept of audiences for the twenty-first century.

In the 1990s, the male confessional novel, most prominently represented by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity but also by writers such as Tim Lott (White City Blue and Mike Gayle (My Legendary Girlfriend articulated the structure of feeling of the male generation in their late twenties/early-to-mid-thirties.The book presents the advent of the male confessional novel in a fresh and yet critical light, challenging the feminist claim that the genre should be understood as a backlash against feminism and a relapse into sexism. By applying an eclectic theoretical framework, ranging from Raymond Williams to Anthony Giddens, Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, the study illustrates why the male confessional novel is too complex a phenomenon to be solely interpreted in terms of retrosexism. It convincingly shows how the multitude of postmodern gender scripts adds to the crisis of identity and to the problematic nature of clearly defined gender relationships.

When Technocultures Collide provides rich and diverse studies of collision courses between technologically inspired subcultures and the corporate and governmental entities they seek to undermine. The adventures and exploits of computer hackers, phone phreaks, urban explorers, calculator and computer collectors, "e;CrackBerry"e; users, whistle-blowers, Yippies, zinsters, roulette cheats, chess geeks, and a range of losers and tinkerers feature prominently in this volume. Gary Genosko analyzes these practices for their remarkable diversity and their innovation and leaps of imagination. He assesses the results of a number of operations, including the Canadian stories of Mafiaboy, Jeff Chapman of Infiltration, and BlackBerry users. The author provides critical accounts of highly specialized attributes, such as the prospects of deterritorialized computer mice and big toe computing, the role of electrical grid hacks in urban technopolitics, and whether info-addiction and depression contribute to tactical resistance. Beyond resistance, however, the goal of this work is to find examples of technocultural autonomy in the minor and marginal cultural productions of small cultures, ethico-poetic diversions, and sustainable withdrawals with genuine therapeutic potential to surpass accumulation, debt, and competition. The dangers and joys of these struggles for autonomy are underlined in studies of RIM's BlackBerry and Julian Assange's WikiLeaks website.

Throughout centuries of European colonial domination, the bodies of Middle Eastern dancers, male and female, move sumptuously and seductively across the pages of Western travel journals, evoking desire and derision, admiration and disdain, allure and revulsion. This profound ambivalence forms the axis of an investigation into Middle Eastern dance an investigation that extends to contemporary belly dance. Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, through historical investigation, theoretical analysis, and personal reflection, explores how Middle Eastern dance actively engages race, sex, and national identity. Close readings of colonial travel narratives, an examination of Oscar Wilde s Salome, and analyses of treatises about Greek dance, reveal the intricate ways in which this controversial dance has been shaped by Eurocentric models that define and control identity performance.

This is the third volume of an interdisciplinary publication, drawing on contemporary scholarship in such fields as speech communication, education, anthropology, sociology, history and English.

In contemporary global capitalist culture, time-consciousness becomes more important than self-consciousness. This book explores lived temporalities on markets, in buses and in traditional subsistence in Guatemala, and a theoretical exploration of these through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and inter-relational approaches within psychoanalysis.

This is the first volume of an interdisciplinary publication, drawing on contemporary scholarship in such fields as speech communication, education, anthropology, sociology, history and English.

Part of the "Cultural Studies" series, which draws on contemporary scholarship in such fields as speech communication, education, anthropology, sociology, history, and English. This annual contains papers that focus on the intersection of interpretive critical theory, qualitative inquiry, culture, media, history, biography and social structure.

This is the 5th volume in the series Cultural Studies, edited by Norman K. Denzin

This is the second volume of an interdisciplinary publication, drawing on contemporary scholarship in such fields as speech communication, education, anthropology, sociology, history and English.