Popular Culture" and the Academy (original) (raw)

Popular Culture: Towards a Definition

2015

Introduction Popular culture springs from society. It is a reflection of the hopes and aspirations, fears and insecurities, and the inter-personal relationships of people constituting that society. It is shaped by, and shapes, the consciousness of an entire civilisation or race. It is an inseparable part of life and a permanent record of what people believe in and what they are. Popular culture is varied in its forms and diverse in its implications. It has been defined as all the experiences in life shared by people in common. Michael J. Bell has given an apt definition of popular culture which gives importance to its purpose, form and function. He comments: At its simplest popular culture is the culture of mass appeal. A creation is popular when it is created to respond to the experiences and values of the majority, when it is produced in such a way that the majority have lay access to it, and when it can be understood and interpreted by the majority without the aid of special know...

Toward a Definition of Popular Culture

The most common definitions of popular culture suffer from a presentist bias and cannot be applied to pre-industrial and pre-capitalist societies. A survey reveals serious conceptual difficulties as well. We may, however, gain insight in two ways. 1) By moving from a Marxist model (economic/class/production) to a more Weberian approach (societal/status/consumption). 2) By looking to Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” and Danto’s and Dickie’s “Institutional Theory of Art,” and defining popular culture as “unauthorized culture.” Keywords: popular culture, cultural capital, “institutional theory of art,” Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci

THE REPRESENTATION AND SIGNIFICANCE OF POPULAR CULTURE IN MODERN SOCIETY

Research Journal of English Language and Literature, 2022

The works of Popular Culture are often defined as what the ordinary people prefer rather than what appeals to the educated elite class. Popular Culture has always been a site for debate regarding its importance and acceptability compared to 'high' culture. For a long time, the works of Popular Culture was dismissed as a lowly form of art for their commercial nature and natural appeal to the masses. In this article, the researcher attempts to locate the concept of Popular Culture and its significance in a society that is very dynamic. The researcher is endeavouring to throw some light on the misconceptions about the works of Popular Culture and, at the same time, reflecting upon its significance in the changes it brought in society. Moreover, the article also discusses how Popular Culture has been and still is a location for a biased and highly sexualised representation of women.

Cultural Theory and Popular Culture A Reader

In this seventh edition of his award-winning Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, John Storey has extensively revised the text throughout. As before, the book presents a clear and critical survey of competing theories of and various approaches to popular culture. Its breadth and theoretical unity, exemplified through popular culture, means that it can be flexibly and relevantly applied across a number of disciplines. Retaining the accessible approach of previous editions, and using appropriate examples from the texts and practices of popular culture, this new edition features: ■ Improved and expanded content throughout ■ A new section on 'The contextuality of meaning' that explores how context impacts meaning ■ A brand new chapter on 'The materiality of popular culture' that examines popular culture as material culture ■ Extensive updates to the companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/storey, which includes practice questions, extension activities and interactive quizzes, links to relevant websites and further reading, and a glossary of key terms.

Popular Culture in the Classroom

Culture: A User's Guide traverses a vast range of popular culture—its slippery defi nitions, its history as a fi eld of study, the stakes in its production and consumption , its relevance to the construction of the body, community, space, globalization— with specifi city, nuance and lucidity. As a textbook, one of its core aims is to increase students' critical agency in their relationships to popular culture. Especially as we're back on the treadmill of rising class sizes and diminishing resources, it also represents very welcome support for instructors. One of the smartest moves of a very smart book is how it negotiates the potential student-teacher divide in this fi eld in order to fl ush out critical and ideological principles. As O'Brien and Szeman put it: For students, what often proves most illuminating (or, for some, simply irritating) about taking a course in cultural studies is its revelation of the connection between popular culture and power. For teachers, one of the insights that proves most strangely elusive—one that they often need to be reminded of by students—is that popular culture is about pleasure. Figuring out what happens at the intersection of those forces of power and pleasure is perhaps the principal value of studying popular culture (24). Th e power-pleasure axis recurs throughout the book, nuancing its analysis of popular representation, production and consumption. Shopping, for example, is discussed as a site both of individual desire, pleasure and agency and of structural restrictions and corporate manipulation, ultimately a practice that is " neither wholly empowering nor wholly disempowering " (175). Th e book clearly results from considerable pedagogical experience. Without explicitly saying so, and without a hint of condescension, O'Brien and Szeman anticipate and discourage some tendencies—such as generalization, presentism, purism, and theoretical obscurantism—which can dog discussions of popular culture in and be