Re-reading Popular Culture

by Hermes, Joke

• ISBN13: 9781405122443
• ISBN10: 1405122447
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-30
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Re-reading Popular Culture is an entertaining investigation of the meanings and value of popular culture today. It explores the theme of cultural citizenship by combining textual analysis and media reception theory to analyze popular culture. Includes such contemporary issues as the rewriting of masculinity after the success of feminism, and the layers of meaning in semi-public and private talk of multiculturalism and ethnicity Traces its topics across a variety of media forms and texts, including sports; detective fiction and police series; and children's television and games Clearly and accessibly written for the student, scholar, and general reader.

Author Biography

Joke Hermes is Lecturer in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Reading Women’s Magazines (1995) and co-editor of Public Places, Popular Issues (1998).

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: popular culture/cultural citizenship	1	(20)
The citizenship qualities of popular culture
Freedom and stricture
The politics of self-formation
Defining cultural citizenship in relation to popular culture
Usable stories, fictional rehearsal, and working through
Regarding method
Popular culture as (revolutionary) force
The chapters to follow
1 Ethnicity, football, and the nation	21	(20)
Dutch football and the Surinamese legion
Ethnography
Fan involvement as citizenship
2 Negotiating global popular culture	41	(20)
Dutch police series
International crime fiction
Practices of representation and the reader
3 Conservative feminism and the detective novel	61	(18)
Everyday feminism, the interpretive community, and cultural citizenship
A "good" detective novel and the ideal reader: the ambiguous status of the detective novel
Cultural citizenship and crime fiction reading
4 Masculinity and the merits of textual analysis as part of an audience study	79	(17)
On irritation
Masculinity and the text
Methodology and understanding popular culture
5 Critical viewership	96	(19)
Post-feminist television
Web journalism and Ally McBeal and Sex and the City
"Jump the Shark"
The lump the Shark" response to Ally McBeal and Sex and the City
Conclusion
6 Children and the media	115	(20)
Good intentions
Just for fun
Children's cultural citizenship
7 Popular culture: a modern and a postmodern genealogy	135	(20)
Modernism, popular culture, and gender
Postmodernism and gender in the popular culture project
Toward a new understanding of popular culture
Concluding remarks	155	(5)
Popular culture and cultural citizenship
Popular culture and civic disengagement
The art of listening to others
References	160	(12)
Index	172