Eschatology in Pop Culture

A Brief History of Scholarly Study of Detective Fiction, with Particular Attention to the Detective & Mystery Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association

Where can one find a bust of Elvis Presley, a life-size cutout of Lionel Ritchie, a Country Music Hall of Fame flyswatter, and hundreds of thousands of recordings? What collection houses a wide variety of fanzines, holds manuscripts of mystery writers Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini, and has been chosen as repository of Archives of Romance Writers of America? The Sound Recordings Archives and Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) house these and countless similar materials. In addition supporting curriculum of university, both collections have established reputations as national and international research centers for scholars interested in studying products of our culture. HISTORY As was fairly common among academic institutions in early 1960s, several academic departments at BGSU, including School of Music, developed independent collections of sound recordings. The collections were managed within each department and were intended for use by faculty and students of respective departments. Unfortunately, no provision had been made meet audio needs of rest of university. In 1967, library responded requests for support by establishing Audio Center, later renamed Sound Recordings Archives. William L. Schurk was hired in 1967 as first head of new center. Holding an M.S.L.S. from Western Reserve University's library school, Schurk had been an inveterate collector of sound recordings and other popular materials since his pre-teen years. In same year, Ray Browne joined faculty of BGSU's English Department. Although his academic background was in folklore and literature, Browne's primary interests lay in American- and popular-culture studies. Despite expected campus-wide skepticism, Browne found pockets of support - especially from dean of Graduate College - for study of popular culture, and he worked add relevant courses BGSU curriculum. He also believed it vital for library collect materials in support of these fledgling offerings. Browne found an ally in Schurk, who soon assumed title of Popular Culture Librarian in addition his position as head of Audio Center. The two collections developed in tandem for a number of years as team of Schurk and Browne undertook task of establishing one of first library collections intended collect and preserve that which was considered trivial - if not worthless - by academic community. The Audio Center opened in July 1968 and was intended to serve mainly as a place where students [could] round out classroom material with pertinent recordings.(1) At its opening, center's holdings included more than two thousand recordings of speeches, plays, and a wide variety of popular music. Initial holdings came from purchases, duplicates from Schurk's personal collection, and donations from area radio stations. The audio technology was representative of era, consisting of a central control booth from which selections could be played for up twenty-four students seated at remote listening stations. In addition audio materials, center's collections also included print materials - such as periodicals, catalogs, and discographies - related sound-recording industry. During this period, Browne continued his crusade legitimize popular as an area of academic inquiry. The Center for Study of Popular Culture attracted regional and national attention beginning in 1969, by which time popular-culture collection had been given a home in BGSU's library. According Schurk and Browne, the Popular Culture Library began with a gift of various materials (books, phonograph records, artifacts, etc.) worth approximately $100,000 from Bill Randie, Cleveland, Ohio radio personality.(2) From June through December 1969, articles about program and collections appeared in a number of publications, including Bowling Green Daily Sentinel-Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dayton Daily News, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Mamaroneck (N. …

This review was inadvertently left out of our last issue, which reassessed the important works of our journal's founder, Ray B. Browne. Against Academia: The History of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Movement, 1967-1988. 2nd ed. Ray B. Browne. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Against Academia was Ray Browne's attempt to define a useable past for a movement seeking legitimacy; it established a timeline with dates, major events, and key personalities - from the earliest days until 1988 when the manuscript was completed. As a true visionary, Ray understood the importance of a narrative record of his innovations. While teaching at Purdue in 1965, Ray hosted an American studies conference where scholars like R?ssel Nye (a Pulitzer Prize winner), and Tom Towers shared their interests in interdisciplinary studies; Ray urged a broader application beyond high to folklore and culture. Surprisingly, there was resistance by many Americanists, crystallized by William Gass in his assertion that culture cripples consciousness (12). When Ray arrived at Bowling Green in 1967, he was pleased to find administrators who helped him start a Center for the Study of Popular Culture and to begin publication of a Journal of Popular Culture. In 1969, with R?ssel Nye, Marshall Fishwick and others, Browne founded the Popular Culture Association. As the organizational structure evolved, the pioneers were joined by John G. Cawelti (University of Chicago), Carl Bode (University of Maryland), David Madden (Louisiana State University), and Philip G. Durham (UCLA). The first national meeting was held at Michigan State University in the spring of 1971. (The conference program is included as an appendix.) Meanwhile, back in Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Ray and Pat Browne created the Popular Press in 1970 and collected a nucleus for a Popular Culture Library (which today occupies an entire floor of the Jerome Library on the BGSU campus). From the popular press offices, the Brownes tapped talents of local campus colleagues to produce an innovative journal entitled Popular Music and Society plus a very important Journal of Cultural Geography. Both were successful. Another experiment was The Journal of Regional Cultures, an effort which died on the vine after a handsome, single issue was published on the Southwest (alas, Rollins as Editor). Not every sprig bloomed. …

I78 Reviews Nouvelles mythologies de lamort. By ISABELLECASTA. (Bibliotheque de Litterature Gen6rale etComparee, 67) Paris: Champion. 2006. 228 pp. E43. ISBN 978 2-7453-I495-6. Has our relation to death changed? This is the question Isabelle Casta sets out to answer inherwide-ranging, superbly documented study of recent popular culture in France, Britain, and theUS. Death, thedead, and theundead seem tobe ever-present indetective novels, supernatural fiction, films,and on television. Casta's guiding pre sumption is thatpopular culture tells us more about a society's imaginary than high art or theorycould. The book catalogues thedistinctivelymodern traitsof thecentral figures in thenew mythologies of death: the serial killer, the detective, and thepatho logist, togetherwith the legions of ghosts, vampires, and zombies who rise from their graves tohaunt our fictionand our dreams. The point here isnot that these figures aremodern inventions in themselves, but that something has changed in theway they are represented. The reader or viewer is spared no detail of the victim's suffering; the pathologist's examination of the corpse is described with meticulous accuracy; and the supernatural mingles seamlessly with the everyday as ghosts routinelywalk among us. Casta's study relishes theprofusion of gory evidence, piling example upon example to show theoverwhelming variety and coherence of her themes across a vast number of works. The cumulative effectof the analyses is impressive, as the book demonstrates both society's pervasive fascinationwith death and the stubborn belief that death is not the end. The key work here isBuffy theVampire Slayer. In 144 episodes of the television series and dozens of novels, Buffy is a sweet, attractive ado lescent in sunny California facing theordinary difficulties of growing up, learning to deal with familyand friends,not entirely keeping up with her schoolwork, and begin ning toexplore her emerging sexuality. She isalso theChosen One, living on the edge of theHellmouth, uniquely capable of defending humankind against Evil. She is the Slayer who kills demons and vampires but who also sometimes falls in lovewith them, sleeps with them, dies herself (twice) and is resurrected, before ultimately leading a band ofwarriors into the final, apocalyptic showdown which will decide the fate of theentireworld. The phenomenal success ofBuffy theVampire Slayer comes from its dazzling combination of teen drama and themes of Shakespearian proportions: death, sacrifice, and forbidden love.Casta takesBuffy very seriously, and the affectionate at tention she pays it,especially inher finalchapter, pays dividends as she demonstrates persuasively how it involves a verymodern take on some very ancient themes. The book represents an extremely valuable contribution to the academic study of popu lar culture and theway itencodes, mirrors, and informs society's attitudes towards death. Given that the author is clearly very familiarwith English-language culture, it is surprising that she does not make more use of scholarly work written inEnglish in the fieldofwhat is sometimes called hauntology. Moreover, her focus on popular culture means that she says little about the themes of death and the dead inmore rarefiedbut perhaps no less interesting contemporary texts. Itwould be interesting to know, forexample, how theghosts which appear innumerous modern filmsdo or do not relate to the spectres of Jacques Derrida's philosophy or, inpsychoanalysis, to the phantoms disinterred by analysts drawing on thework ofNicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. On its own merits, though, this is a fascinating and powerful book, driven by a sharp insight into the refusal of death which strikes against a knowledge of our own mortality: 'moi qui parle de lamort (des autres), je vaismourir' (p. 194). ROYAL HOLLOWAY,UNIVERSITY OF LONDON COLIN DAVIS ...

Japanese popular culture has arrived on American college campuses as never before. Student interest in Japanese manga (comic books), anime (animated films and television shows), and video games drives much of the enrollment in Japanese courses and Japanese majors and minors. In response to student interest, as well as the establishment of popular culture as a topic of serious academic scholarship, the demand for courses on Japanese popular culture has never been higher. Yet the number of scholars specializing in the study of popular culture is still relatively small. This can potentially create problems, as faculty teach outside their expertise, and perhaps face an uncomfortable situation in which the students know more about the topic than the professor. In this article, I will offer some suggestions and advice for faculty creating a popular culture course for the first time, based on my experiences teaching undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame. The course I developed reflects my background in Japanese literature and film, and is but one example of many possible approaches to the topic. The sample syllabus and list of resources at the end of this article provide citations for all text and media sources mentioned.

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 32, Issue 2 p. 163-163 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association: Lifetime Memberships are now available in the Popular Culture Association and/or the American Culture Association. First published: 05 March 2004 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1998.00163.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume32, Issue2Fall 1998Pages 163-163 RelatedInformation

From One Medium to the Next: How Comic Books Create Richer Storylines

BLURB FOR TOTAL PROP MAILER Total Propaganda moves the study of propaganda out of the exclusive realm of world politics into the more inclusive study of popular culture, media, and politics. All the participatory functioning elements of the society are aspects of membership in the popular culture. Thus, the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and even international trade become everyday propaganda to which everyone may relate. To emphasize the necessity for new thinking about propaganda, Edelstein creates the concepts of the new propaganda and the old, and he devises a language of uninyms to convey their meanings more quickly. Oldprop is characteristic of mass cultures and utilizes totalitarian methods of conflict, hegemony, minimization, demonization, and exclusiveness to achieve its goals. By contrast, newprop is created by members of the popular culture to allow them to engage in accomodation, enhance the individual, and promote inclusiveness. Shifts in the old and the new propaganda are tracked across social issues such as race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, and the environment, as well as in fashion, politics, advertising, sports, media, and politics. Central to the concept of total propaganda is that it is not simply additive; it is the product of new energies that are produced by the fusing of propaganda in such related forums as music, art, advertising, sports and politics. It is these synergies, and their production of new energies, that make total propaganda greater than the sum of its parts. Edelstein concludes that the most important distinction that should be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text; i.e., its propaganda. In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda; in a mass culture almost everyone consumes it but only a few create it. This formulation offers new ways to discuss power and ideology in media texts. As an example, where once the least informed and the least educated were the most subject to propaganda, now the most informed and most educated often are the first to create propaganda and the first to consume it. FORMER BLURB COPY.......It is widely recognized that the mass media provide us with ample information which we use to construct some sense of the world around us. It is not as widely recognized that consumers of media messages are active in this constructive process, making meanings that are sensible to them in particular life circumstances. The media target a younger, more media savvy generation who are more likely to be participants in the messages than members of any previous generation. This participatory aspect of new media is central to what the author defines as the new propaganda. Although critical and cultural theories are often prohibitive for undergraduate students, the author's formulation offers an accessible way to discuss power and ideology in media texts. Without using the critical discourse, he provides compelling arguments that power and ideology are created and maintained through the active participation of audience members. The conceptualization of the old and new propagandas helps move the study of propaganda out of the realm of world politics into the study of popular culture. The author views all of the participatory functioning of the society as aspects of membership in a more embracing popular culture. This point of view recognizes that the mass media are extremely important forces in the consumer's construction of reality and that they are no longer exclusive channels for disseminating the messages of the powerful elites. Instead, the media -- particularly the new media -- are accessible to and used frequently by less powerful members of society -- children, ethnic minorities, and marginal members of society -- to create realities that more satisfactorily fulfill their needs. NEW BLURB COPY FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... Total Propaganda is a fresh answer to the question of the inclusiveness of the popular culture. It demonstrates how the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and international trade have become everyday propaganda to which everyone relates in some way. Edelstein demonstrates that the most important distinction that can be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text (i.e., its propaganda). In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda, whereas in a mass culture, almost everyone consumes but only a few create it. This book presents a new language of propaganda that makes it possible to draw comparisons between mass and popular cultures. The language is used to observe shifts in propaganda across various social issues -- race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, the environment, print and broadcast media, new technologies, and politics. It also examines fashion, advertising, sports, and lobbying. Total Propaganda is not defined only quantitatively; it mirrors the synergies that have come about in every social and political realm and the energies that these synergies produce. As such, the sum of total propaganda is greater than the sum of its parts.

UP FROM ELITISM: THE AESTHETICS OF POPULAR FICTION Ray R. Rrowne* When Adam delved and Eve span Who was then the esthetician? The question of the esthetics of popular fiction is tied in with many complex drives, most of which reflect man's apparent necessity to arrive at and maintain some kind of pecking order that places him above somebody else. Although snobbery, the feeling of superiority and inferiority—like death and the exploitation of the poor—has always been with us, it probably received its most famous and longlasting boost in the person of the nineteenth-century Rritish poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, who insisted that culture was something only a few fortunate individuals were born with or could ever achieve; some people had it while others did not; in definition, culture was the best thoughts of mankind most beautifully expressed. Arnold's most articulate followers in our day have been such individuals as Dwight MacDonald, Edmund Wilson, Stanley Kauffmann , and William Gass, among many others. They base their thoughts on the philosophy of Plato, the political attitudes of Edmund Rurke, Ortega d'Gasset, to name just a few. These critics insist that there is a great chasm between high and low culture—between highbrow , mid-brow, low-brow, or mass-brow, and I suppose, folk-brow (whatever one wants to call the brow hierarchy) and that as the gap gets larger, it is the role of the conscientious critic to fight to the death to save, resurrect, revitalize the elite. Anything but elite culture—and strangely and romantically folk culture—is deplorable. Mass culture, popular culture, and everyday culture of a large majority of people, is to the elite critic ignorant, visceral, mindless, cheap, tawdry, and driving to self-destruction while it drags civilization with it. Elite culture is to these people avant-garde and "intellectual." The attitude of these people can perhaps be correctly summed up in that of one of the high priests. F. R. Leavis, who wrote in a small pamphlet, Mass *Ray B. Browne is a Professor of English and Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, where he is also the Editor of theJournal ofAmerican Culture, theJournal of Popular Culture, and the Journal of Regional Cultures. He is currently working on a book of fetishes and fetishism in American culture. 218Ray B. Browne Civilization and Minority Culture (1930), that the small minority of proper critics in the world "constitute the consciousness of the race" and must save the world from "popular fiction" and other damning influences . "Art," he insisted, is "the storehouse of recorded values and in consequence there is a relationship between the quality of the individual 's response to art and his general fitness for a humane existence." Such an attitude is loaded with nonsense, of course, from the very basic assumption that the critic should arrogate the right to be the aesthetic conscience of the world. Further, the attitude is based on the assumption that critical attitudes are immutable and therefore aesthetic standards are unchangeable. Experience demonstrates continually the contrary. Yesterday's classic often is today's forgotten work—unless it is artificially kept alive in the classroom. And yesterday 's elite critic is generally looked upon now as a historical curiosity, hard to understand even in a society of the past which might have been freer to accept such pomposity as truth. Yesterday's best-seller—which was duly consigned to the dust heap by the elite critics—is often today's classic: Dickens' works, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With The Wind, Dorothy L. Sayer's The Circular Staircase, Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Jack Shaeffer's Shane, Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Wilkie Collins' Moonstone. The list goes on and on. Leavis' attitude is filled with many other assumptions which are only half truths. That it is only the "serious" work that is avant-garde is subject to many corrections. Although popular culture is undoubtedly the backbone of conservatism and maintains and furthers the status quo, it is sufficiently broad and amorphous as to allow and even encourage all kinds of newness. Leslie Fiedler is surely partially correct when he said that popular...

The aim of this article is to explore some critical moments in the formation of 'popular' culture studies. This objective is not exhaustive, cannot be exhaustive in the space of a single article, since popular cultural studies have grown into an academic industry which not even five live-times of academic work by any individual can exhaust! This article is therefore, a rapid but hopefully, provocative view of understanding popular culture. The article uses the concept of myth to problematize some aspects of the debates of popular culture in some works by the Frankfurt school, the pioneering work of E. P Thompson, Stuart Hall and in the case of Africa, the work of Njabulo Ndebele. None of these works claim to be canonical in their treatment of popular culture. However, the problem identified in this article and therefore to be ad- dressed is that there still remains a certain condescending theoretical attitude in the definitions of what is popular by works indicated above. To be sure, each of these writers on popular culture have evolved from previous standpoints and yet it is still important, particularly from an African perspective where the popular is still viewed as inferior, to trace the genealogy of this mistrust of the popular. We argue that myths and symbols of popular culture should be viewed as social constructs; they do not represent the interests of everyone in the community in the same way, for ever.

A course in popular culture was offered at the School of Library and Information Science, State University of New York at Albany, for the first time in the summer of 1972. The course provided an unusual opportunity to explore certain dimensions of communications processes, librarianship, and the cultural environment of libraries that, though not necessarily new to the curriculum, needed a sharper focus. After several experimental versions, 617: Popular Culture and the Library was added to the curriculum as a regular elective course. In the school's printed catalog, it is described as follows: Lib. 617. The nature and social functions of the contemporary popular culture as disseminated by the mass media; the relationship between the popular culture and the library. Bibliographic sources, selection and acquisition problems.1 Among other things, the course asks students to seriously consider the proposition that the information transmitted by such popular culture figures as Rod McKuen, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles, Tarzan (and Jane), Archie Bunker, and Georgette Heyer is as important as the information that flows through channels serving scientists and scholars. Some of my colleagues have responded to this suggestion with interest and sympathy, others with bemused silence or stunned incredulity. The following account of some of the thinking that went into the course at Albany will try to demonstrate that popular culture is a profoundly significant part of the total informational environment in which we all live and work, and that a study of popular culture can provide a useful framework for a consideration of

The export of Japanese television programs overseas started in the 1970s and the rapid
\ngrowth of Japanese television programs globally especially in Asia started in the early 1980s.
\nHowever, in the 21st century, the glory of Japanese dramas seems to have faded and replaced by the
\n“Korean wave”. Perhaps the younger generation nowadays has not heard of “J-Pop” and here is an
\nexamination of the past consumption of the Japanese television culture outside of Japan, especially
\nAsia.

This well focused and perceptive analysis of a phenomenon in our popular culture--the new respectability of the comic book form--argues that the comics medium has a productive tradition of telling true stories with grace and economy. It details vividly the outburst of underground comics in the late 1960s and '70s, whose cadre of artistically gifted creators were committed to writing comic books for adults, an audience they made aware that comic books can offer narratives of great power and technical sophistication. In this study Joseph Witek examines the rise of the comic book to a position of importance in modern culture and assesses its ideological and historical implications. Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar are among the creators whom Witek credits for the emergence of the comic book as a serious artistic medium. As American codes of ethics, aesthetics, and semiotics have evolved, so too has the comic book as a mode for presenting the weightier matters of history. It is safe to claim that comic books are not just for kids anymore.

At the core of what we know as popular culture studies today is the work of scholars associated with or influenced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Popular culture itself and intellectual interest in its risks and possibilities, however, long predate this moment. Earlier in the 20th century, members of the Frankfurt School took an active interest in what was then referred to as “mass culture” or the culture industry. Semiotics, emerging in the latter half of the 20th century as an exciting new methodology of cultural analysis, turned to popular culture for many of its objects as it redefined textuality, reading, and meaning. The works of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco are exemplary in this regard. The work of the Birmingham school, also known as British cultural studies, drew from both of these intellectual traditions but went on to forge its own unique methods drawing on Marxist and poststructuralist theoretical legacies. Quickly spreading across the Anglophone world, Cultural Studies is now widely recognized, if not as a discipline proper, as a distinctive branch of the humanities. Other methodologies contemporaneous with this trend are also now clubbed together as part of this generalized practice of cultural studies. Important among these are feminist approaches to popular culture exemplified by work on Hollywood cinema and women’s melodrama in particular, the study of images and representations through a mass communications approach, and ethnographic studies of readers of popular romances and television audiences. A minor, theoretically weak tradition of popular culture studies initiated by Ray Browne parallelly in the Unites States may also be mentioned. More recently, Slavoj Zizek has introduced startlingly new ways of drawing popular cultural texts into philosophical debates. If all of these can be taken together as constituting what is generally referred to as popular culture studies today, it is still limited to the 20th century. Apart from the Frankfurt School and semiotics, British cultural studies also counts among the precursors it had to settle scores with, the tradition of cultural criticism in Britain that Matthew Arnold and in his wake F. R. Leavis undertook as they sought to insulate “the best of what was thought and said” from the debasing influence of the commercial press and mass culture in general. But the history of popular culture as an object of investigation and social concern goes further back still to the 18th and 19th centuries, the period of the rise and spread of mass literature, boosted by the rise of a working-class readership.

Popular culture is becoming ever more important to political communication and political understanding. In this article popular culture is defined as schematic in its syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures, individualised and gendered. These three features are shown to underlie and guide the performance of popular culture as political communication, especially when popular culture appears as political fiction in movies and television series; when popular culture is used as a political stage for political actors who take on standard personas; and when popular culture functions as a political practice in itself, for instance, in talk shows and popular music. These three ways in which popular culture functions as a form of political communication are elaborated in the various contributions in this special issue to which this article provides the introduction.