Popular culture Books

Book SynopsisDo liminal embodied experiences such as illness, death and dying affect literary form? In recent years, the concept of embodiment has been theorized from various perspectives. Gender studies have been concerned with the cultural implications of embodiment, arguing to move away from viewing the body as a prediscursive phenomenon to regarding it as an acculturated body. Age studies have extended this view to the embodied experience of ageing, while drawing attention to the ways in which the ageing body, through its materiality and plasticity, restricts the possibilities of (de)constructing subjectivity. These current debates on embodiment find a strong counterpart in literary representation. The contributions to this anthology investigate how and to what extend physical borderline experiences affect literary form.Trade Review"Each of the articles that compose the collection invites the readers into a nuanced analysis of protagonists who live through intense pain and illness, highlighting the potentialities of language as well as the contradictions that arise inside the same protagonists between their failing bodies, their selves and societys expectations." Maricel Or-Piqueras, Ageculturehumanities, 5(2020)

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Book SynopsisCultural communities are shaped and produced by ongoing processes of translation understood as aesthetic media practices - such is the premise of this volume. Taking on perspectives from cultural, literary and media studies as well as postcolonial theory, the chapters shed light on composite cultural and heterotypical translation processes across various media, such as texts, films, graphic novels, theater and dance performances. Thus, the authors explore the cultural contexts of diverse media milieus in order to explain how cultural communities come into being.

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Book SynopsisWhat does it take to cross a border, and what does it take to belong? Sandra Noeth examines the entangled experiences of borders and of collectivity through the perspective of bodies. By dramaturgical analyses of contemporary artistic work from Lebanon and Palestine, Noeth shows how borders and collectivity are constructed and negotiated through performative, corporeal, movement-based, and sensory strategies and processes. This interdisciplinary study is made urgent by social and political transformations across the Middle East and beyond from 2010 onwards. It puts to the fore the residual, body-bound structural effects of borders and of collectivity and proceeds to develop notions of agency and responsibility that are immanently bound to bodies in relation.

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Book SynopsisWhat do literary texts tell us about growing old? The essays in this volume introduce and explore representations of ageing and old age in canonical works of English and postcolonial literature. The contributors examine texts by William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Julian Barnes, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Alice Munro, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace and, together with a medical study, they suggest solutions to the challenges arising from the current demographic change brought about by ageing Western populations.

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Book SynopsisIs it possible to create a community where everyone lives according to their own rhythm, and yet respects the individual rhythms of others? This volume contains new essays which investigate and actualize the concepts that Roland Barthes discussed in his famous 1977 lecture series on "How to Live Together" at the Collège de France.The anthology presents original and thought-provoking approaches to questions of conviviality and "idiorrhytmic life forms" in literature, arts and other media.The essays are written by 32 highly competent scholars from seven countries, representing literary studies, philosophy, social sciences, theology, church history, psychoanalysis, art history, architecture, media studies, history of ideas, and biology.

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Book SynopsisWhile social change regarding trans(sexuality) has evolved within an expanding nexus of concepts, practices, regulations and institutions, this process has barely been analysed systematically. Against the background of legislative processes on gender recognition in a society shaped by heteronormative hegemony, Adrian de Silva traces how sexology, the law, federal politics and the trans movement interacted to generate or challenge concepts of trans(sexuality) from the mid-1960s to 2014 in the Federal Republic of Germany. The interdisciplinary study draws upon and contributes to debates in (trans)gender and queer studies, political science, sociology of law, sexology and the social movement.

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Book SynopsisWherever we turn, we find creative practices and creative spaces, creative organizations and creative subjects. At work or in public places, in media representations and in advertisements, on social platforms, in schools and universities: There is a demand to be new and special, conspicuous and singular. How did this creativity complex and its imperative to be creative come about? Which terms and concepts enable us to understand its multiple and partly contradictory forms and processes? Where are its limits? Gathering and interweaving 40 short and incisive essays, this companion maps, investigates and illuminates the contemporary creativity complex.

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Book SynopsisThe relationship between economy, finance and society has become opaque. Quantum leaps in complexity and scale have turned this deeply interdependent web of relations into an area of incomprehensible abstraction. And while the economization of life has come under widespread critique, inquiry into the political potential of representational praxis is more crucial than ever. This volume explores ethical, aesthetic and ideological dimensions of economic representation, redressing essential questions: What are the roles of mass and new media? How do the arts contribute to critical discourse on the global techno-economic complex? Collectively, the contributions bring theoretical debate and artistic intervention into a rich exchange that includes but also exceeds the conventions of academic scholarship.

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Book SynopsisHuman rights violations linked to norms of health, fitness, and social usefulness have long been overlooked by Historic Justice Studies. Kathrin Braun introduces the concept of "injuries of normality" to capture the specifics of this type of human rights violation and the respective struggles for historic justice. She examines the processes of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the context of coercive sterilization, institutional killings, as well as the persecution of homosexual men and of "asocials" under Nazi rule. She argues that an analytic perspective on political temporality allows us to better understand the formation of these biopolitical human rights violations and their exclusion from memory and historic justice.

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Book SynopsisThe essays, poetry, and visual art collected here consider the more-than-human cultures of our multispecies world. At a time when humanity's impact has put our planet's ecosystems into great jeopardy, the book explores literary, sonic, and visual imaginaries that feature encounters between and across a variety of living creatures: beetles and bisons, people and pigeons, trees and spiderwebs, vegetables and violets, orchards and octopi, vampires and tricksters. Offering a wide range of critical and creative contributions to Human Animal Studies, Critical Plant Studies and the Nonhuman Turn, the volume seeks to foster new ways of imagining a more "response-able" coexistence on our shared Earth.Trade Review"It's an anthology that's got it all: Probably not an easy read for quick reference, but still highly recommended." Ulrike Schwerdtner, http://tierbefreiungsarchiv.de, 8 (2020), translated from German "The volume captivates with its impressive illustrations." Kochen ohne Knochen, 38/1 (2020), translated from German

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Book SynopsisMonarchies are facing public demands for modernization and adapting to changing societal, political, and media environments. This book proposes new directions in the research of contemporary European monarchies and offers innovative perspectives on trans/national royal public interactions and (semi-)fictional representations of monarchs. Its case studies address historic and recent developments, including newly invented royal traditions, media depictions, Meghan Markle's impact on the image of the British monarchy, and the royal family's role in Brexit negotiations. With its interdisciplinary analyses, the book reflects current academic, societal, and popular cultural interest in royalty.

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Book SynopsisConnecting migration studies and the theory of valuation, this collection offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of transnational music practices. Conceiving music as a practice not confined to audibility, the contributions reveal how music emerges in concrete situations through people, objects, techniques, meanings, and emotions in different parts of the world and during different historic periods. Values are thereby created and shared, and creative processes are evaluated in terms of diversity, space and exchange. This book presents cases of contemporary, popular and traditional music, festivals and trade fairs, albums and band projects, shedding light on the tensions between the transfer, reconstruction and creation of music in different contexts.

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Book SynopsisGabriela Stoicea examines how the incidence and role of physical descriptions in German novels changed between 1771 and 1929 in response to developments in the study of the human face and body. As well as engaging the tools and methods of literary analysis, the study uses a cultural studies approach to offer a constellation of ideas and polemics surrounding the readability of the human body. By including discussions from the medical sciences, epistemology, and aesthetics, the book draws out the multi-faceted permutations of corporeal legibility, as well as its relevance for the development of the novel and for facilitating inter-disciplinary dialogue.

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Book SynopsisThis volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential. The twelve contributions explore concrete instances of envisioning the open unknown and affirmative speculative potentials in history, literature, comics, computer games, mold research, ecosystem science and artistic practice.

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Book SynopsisMany claim that political deliberation has become exceedingly affective, and hence, destabilizing. The authors of this book revisit that assumption. While recognizing that significant changes are occurring, these authors also point out the limitations of turning to contemporary democratic theory to understand and unpack these shifts. They propose, instead, to reframe this debate by deploying the analytic framework of affective societies, which highlights how affect and emotion are present in all aspects of the social. What changes over time and place are the modes and calibrations of affective and emotional registers. With this line of thinking, the authors are able to gesture towards a new outline of the political.Table of ContentsPreface; Introduction: The Politics of Affective Societies; Making Things Public and Private: The Affective Co-Production of the Political Sphere; Conflict and Consent: The Political Ambivalences of Affect and Emotions; Judgment and Contestation: The Affective Life of Norms; Conclusions: Affective Societies and the Political; Bibliography; List of Authors.

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Book SynopsisThe inclusion of skateboarding as an official discipline in the 2020 Olympic Games marks the pinnacle of a decades-long process of commercialization and sportification. Is the tightly-knit subculture in danger of losing its very identity? This anthology creates an analytical framework for understanding the fundamental conflict between skateboarding's core ethos and the tenets of institutionalized sports. Eleven acclaimed international authors from the fields of architecture, philosophy, sociology, sports sciences and gender studies provide a unique perspective on the manifold manifestations of skateboarding previously ignored by academic discourse.

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Book SynopsisThe way we conceptualise the economy and ourselves as homo economicus has profound consequences for our lives. The contributions to this anthology take debates about the financial crisis, about recent austerity measures or about the Brexit referendum a step further. A common denominator of these dynamics are underlying ideas of "the economy". Each author identifies a facet of Britain's imagined economies. They connect seemingly separate fields such as finance and fiction in order to better understand current political changes. In addition, the book offers an urgently needed interdisciplinary view on the performative power of economic thought - and in this respect moves far beyond merely British perspectives.

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Book SynopsisThe body has become central to practices of self-tracking. By focusing on the relations between quantification, the body, and labor, this volume sheds light on the ways in which discourses on data collection and versions of the "corporate self" are instrumental in redefining concepts of labor, including notions of immaterial and free labor in an increasingly virtual work environment. The contributions explore the functions of quantification in conceptualizing the body as a laboring body and examine how quantification contributes to disciplining the body. By doing so, they also inquire how practices of self-tracking, self-monitoring, and self-optimization have evolved historically.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Laboring Bodies and the Quantified Self; Command and Control: The Quantified Self and Biomedical Transhumanism; Reconsidering Agency and Choice: The Office, the Wall, and the Tax Code (Herman Melville, "Bartleby" and David Foster Wallace, The Pale King); "To Be Reckoned in the Gross": Corporate Storytelling and Quantified Selves in Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End; Racialized Self-Improvement: Advice in Black and White Self-Help of the Interwar Years; The Solipsism of the Quantified Self: Working Bodies in David Foster Wallace's Body of Work; Reading Chick Lit through Numbers: Postfeminist Self-Quantification in Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Karyn Bosnak's What's Your Number?; "I Track my Cycle Religiously": Representations of Fertility Tracking and Childlessness in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs; Compulsive Self-Tracking: When Quantifying the Body Becomes an Addiction; The Portable Peoplemeter Initiative: Wearable Sensor Technologies and Embodied Labor; Instant Nerve-Ana: Biofeedback as Quantified Self Avant la Lettre; Contributors.

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Book SynopsisRecent U.S. literature has both been informed by, and critically engaged with, materialist conceptions of selfhood. Over the past decades, disciplines like neuroscience and evolutionary biology have increasingly recast the human self as a malleable construct produced by physiological processes. In a parallel development, literary authors have created their own conceptions of somatic subjectivity in conjunction or contrast with scientific and medical discourses. Subjects of Substance examines the forms, functions, and effects of materialist models of mind in selected memoirs and novels. Authors discussed include Michael W. Clune, Don DeLillo, Kay Redfield Jamison, Siri Hustvedt, Richard Powers, Elyn R. Saks, and David Foster Wallace.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Materialist Minds; Key Terms and Concepts; "My wayward brain": Cerebral Subjectivity and Narrative Identity in the Neuro-Memoir; "Just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain": Substances and Subjects in the Novels of Don DeLillo; Between Agency and Automatism: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest; Neural Narrative: Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2 and The Echo Maker; Conclusion; Works Cited.

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Book SynopsisDebates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, politics, philosophy), Haun Saussy calls out the typical vices of comparison and proposes ways to unseat them. For however much it is abused, distorted, and manipulated, comparison retains an essential link to the idea of justice.Table of ContentsThe Problem; The Unique, the Comparative and the Competitive; Reckoning with the Other; The Family of Comparisons; The Elasticity of Substitution; Negative Privilege; Birds of a Feather; Noli me tangere; Near and Far; A Museum Without Walls for Walls Without a Museum; Making Room; Envoi; Acknowledgments.

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Book SynopsisIn the past fifty years, port cities around the world have experienced considerable changes to their morphologies and their identities. The increasing intensification of global networks and logistics, and the resulting pressure on human societies and earthly environments have been characteristic of the rise of a "planetary age". This volume engages with contemporary artistic practices and critical poetics that trace an alternate construction of the imaginaries and aspirations of our present societies at the crossroads of sea and land - taking into account complex pasts and interconnected histories, transnational flux, as well as material and immaterial borders.

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Book SynopsisIs the family in crisis? Or do crises crystallize in families' lived realities? Families as constitutive units of all social architectures are central to our democracies. In this book, scholars from cultural, gender, and media studies, lawyers, sociologists, and historians discuss how today's rainbow variety of families crosses borders and how cultural texts - films, TV-series, novels, short stories and magazines, from Europe (Germany, Italy, Spain) and the US - (de-)construct, take part in, and mirror family discourses around topics such as father(hood)s, mother(hood)s and parentage, reproductive decisions and adoption, marriage and divorce, poverty and welfare, and the rhetoric of the nuclear family.

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Book SynopsisSince the fall of the Iron Curtain, formerly socialist countries have gone through manifold transformations, whilst remnants of socialism remain ubiquitous. The volume explores various spaces of the postsocialist landscape, presenting a mixture of real and imaginary spaces, of memory and nostalgia, of aesthetic and political symbolism, of the global East and the global South, of academic and essayistic writing. It casts a glance at the heterogeneous relics of socialism and their transformation in very different parts of the world. From the description of (post-)socialist interiors, façades, neighborhoods, parks, monuments, and objects towards the imaginary spaces of literature, the contributors describe the concreteness and intimacy of some of the places that span across and even beyond of what is left of the "second world" today.Table of ContentsIntroduction; The Ideological Park: How the Tsar's Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space; The Last Soviet City; Spaces of Detachment; (Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space; Postsocialist Hybridities: Finding a Place in Kyrgyzstan; Space under Siege. Sarajevo during and after the War; The Limits of Central Planning: Rudimentary Town Centers in the Planned Cities of Stalinstadt and Sztálinváros; Neighborhood Socialism: A Memoir from 1960s Sofia; Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography; (Re)Mapping National Space: The One Hundred Tourist Sites of Bulgaria and Their Metamorphoses; The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism: New York, Moscow, Pyongyang, Dakar; The Gendered Anxieties of Apartment Living in North Korea, 1953-65; Unreal Estate: Postsocialist China's Dystopic Dreamscapes; Authors.

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Book SynopsisIn the Weimar Republic, popular culture was the scene of heated controversies that tested the limits of national cohesion. How could marginal figures like a stigmatized villager, a grub street writer, or an advocate for nudism become flashpoints of political conflict? Peter S. Fisher draws on Siegfried Kracauer's trenchant observations on Weimar's contradictions to knit these exemplary stories together. Following his methodology, society's underdogs take center stage, pushing the headline makers into the background.Table of ContentsIllustrations; Abbreviations; Introduction; Occultism: Empowerment or Menace?; Colportage: Harmless Pleasure or Dangerous Diversion?; The Schund Law: Defending Morality or Undermining Freedom?; Detective Pulps: Modeling Justice or Glamorizing Crime?; Nudism: Weimar Renaissance or National Degeneration?; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

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Book SynopsisIn remote areas of Europe, local history museums struggle to connect with the rapidly changing and increasingly diverse communities around them. Insa Müller asks how these museums can recast themselves to strengthen the links to their communities. Combining theoretical deliberations, empirical investigations of the case of two Norwegian islands and a museum experiment, she offers starting points for rethinking the local history museum, while at the same time providing suggestions for locally adapted museum practice.Table of ContentsPreface; Summary; Introduction: Local history museums in changing communities: Rethinking the local history museum; Inspiration from museum and memory studies; The Norwegian context; Historical consciousness among Hitra and Frøya's population and the local museum; Memory and history, historical culture, historical consciousness and the local museum; Historical consciousness among Hitra's and Frøya's population; An experiment in contemporary documentation; Documentation of labour immigrants' experiences and views of the local past and present; Concluding remarks: The local museum as facilitator of and partner in negotiations of local history, identity and belonging; Bibliography.

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Book SynopsisHealth programmes that offer "help to self-help" are meant to empower ageing adults to remain independent and self-sufficient at home for as long as possible. But what happens when the private home becomes a political realm in which state intervention and individual agency happen simultaneously? Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish municipality, Amy Clotworthy describes how both health professionals and elderly citizens negotiate the political discourses about health and ageing that frame their relational encounter. By elucidating some of the conflicts, paradoxes, and negotiations that occur, she provides important insights into the contemporary organisation of eldercare.

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Book SynopsisThe impulse for the recent transformations in the Arab world came from the Maghreb. Research on the region has been on the rise since, yet much remains to be done when it comes to interdisciplinary comparative research. The Maghreb is a heterogeneous region that deserves thorough investigation. This volume focuses on Entanglements as a cross-field and cross-lingual concept to generate a new approach to the region and its inner interdependencies as well as exchanges with other regions. Eminent researchers conceptualize Entanglements through the description of various thematic fields and actors in motion, addressing culture, politics, social affairs, and economics.

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Book SynopsisGaming no longer only takes place as a "closed interactive experience" in front of TV screens, but also as broadcast on streaming platforms or as cultural events in exhibition centers and e-sport arenas. The popularization of new technologies, forms of expression, and online services has had a considerable influence on the academic and journalistic discourse about games. This anthology examines which paratexts gaming cultures have produced - i.e., in which forms and formats and through which channels we talk (and write) about games - as well as the way in which paratexts influence the development of games. How is knowledge about games generated and shaped today and how do boundaries between (popular) criticism, journalism, and scholarship have started to blur? In short: How does the paratext change the text?

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Book SynopsisWhat is the heritage of our cities? Which are the monuments, places, and spaces in which it accumulates, and by which practices is it formed, handed down, appropriated? Gerhard Vinken takes the readers to twelve cities on three continents and analyses the diverse and contradictory heritage formations that have had a lasting impact on urban life. The vitality of urban heritage, as these vivid and in-depth case studies show, lies in the dynamic and often conflictual processes of social appropriation and interpretation. Covering a diverse range of themes, the book familiarizes the reader with important questions and theories in urban research and heritage studies.Trade Review"Sophisticated and stimulating book." (translated from German) Klaus R. Kunzmann, Kulturpolitische Mitteilungen, 177/2 (2022)

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Book SynopsisThis volume is dedicated to the interrelation between temporality and representation. It presumes that time cannot be conceived of as an abstract chronometric order, but that it is referring to materiality, being measured, represented, expressed, recognized, experienced and evaluated, and therefore is always closely related to cultural contexts of perception and evaluation.The contributions from various disciplines are dedicated to the present and its plural conditions and meanings. They provide insights into the state of research with special emphasis on the global present as well as on art and aesthetics from the 18th century until today.The anthology includes contributions by Mieke Bal, Stefan Binder, Maximilian Bergengruen, Iris Därmann, Gabriele Genge, Boris Roman Gibhardt, Boris Groys, Maria Muhle, Johannes F. Lehmann, Nkiru Nzegwu, Francesca Raimondi, Christine Ross, Ludger Schwarte, Angela Stercken, Samuel Strehle, Timm Trausch, Patrick Stoffel, and Christina Wessely.

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Book SynopsisContemporary PerforMemory looks at dance works created in the 21st century by choreographers identifying as Afro-European, Jewish, Black, Palestinian, and Taiwanese-Chinese-American. It explores how contemporary dance-makers engage with historical traumas such as the Shoah and the Maafa to reimagine how the past is remembered and how the future is anticipated. The new idea of perforMemory arises within a lively blend of interdisciplinary theory, interviews, performance analysis, and personal storytelling. Scholar and artist Layla Zami traces unexpected pathways, inviting the reader to move gracefully across disciplines, geographies, and histories.Featuring insightful interviews with seven international artists: Oxana Chi, Zufit Simon, André M. Zachery, Chantal Loïal, Wan-Chao Chang, Farah Saleh, and Christiane Emmanuel.

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Book SynopsisWe know that robots are just machines. Why then do we often talk about them as if they were alive? Laura Voss explores this fascinating phenomenon, providing a rich insight into practices of animacy (and inanimacy) attribution to robot technology: from science-fiction to robotics R&D, from science communication to media discourse, and from the theoretical perspectives of STS to the cognitive sciences. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, and backed by a wealth of empirical material, Voss shows how scientists, engineers, journalists - and everyone else - can face the challenge of robot technology appearing "a little bit alive" with a reflexive and yet pragmatic stance.Trade Review"The full book is an accessible and quick read that I would recommend for anyone involved in journalism or media studies." Liz Faber, https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org, 18.08.2021

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Book SynopsisBreaking, popping, locking, waacking, and hip-hop dance are practiced widely in contemporary Vietnam. Considering the dance practices in the larger context of post-socialist transformation, urban restructuring, and changing gender relations, Sandra Kurfürst examines youth's aspirations and desires embodied in dance. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of qualitative data, including interviews, sensory and digital ethnography, she shows how dancers confront social and gender norms while following their passion. As a contribution to area and global studies, the book illuminates the translocal spatialities of hip hop, produced through the circulation of objects and the movement of people.

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Book SynopsisAs social spaces are culturally diverse and digitally networked, the reality of our lives is shaped by processes of globalization and digitization. This leads to the question of whether popular cultures enable or impede (inter-)cultural exchange and global communication. To explore this, the contributors to this volume analyse representations of the intersections of gender and age/ing in cultural and media consumption, such as literature, film, music, and social media. The interconnectedness between gender and aging has been evident since the 1990s and enabled the recognition of age as a cultural category - now is the time to take this intersectional analysis further.

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Book SynopsisFor more than 40 years, hardcore and punk have promised to offer an alternative to what is perceived as the norm and the mainstream. Hardcore Research: Punk, Practice, Politics provides a comprehensive insight into some of the most active, outspoken, and widely received scholarly positions in the academic discourses on hardcore and punk and combines them with a variety of new and emerging voices. The book brings together scholars with personal ties to past and present hardcore and punk scenes, who present both insightful and critical examinations of the rich and varied histories of this subcultural phenomenon and its current reverberations at the intersection of cultural practice and academic research.

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Book SynopsisThe American cultural imaginary is hungry for death, and thus representations of death are prominently repeated and serialized in US literature and media. Stella Castelli shows how American culture fetishizes death as part of a repetition compulsion which stems from the inability of language to satisfactorily grasp death. Taking an intermedial approach, she investigates the forms and tropes born from this preoccupation with death and conceptualizes its imagination alongside an appetite which manifests as repetitive encoding. These metaphors of food consumption provide a hermeneutic framing for analyzing representations of death across American literature and media.

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Book SynopsisBreathing is an unavoidable, vital act, yet it cannot be taken for granted, as the experiences of the pandemic, profound changes in our environment, but also structural, racist discrimination make clear. In the physical act of breathing, we are symbolically, materially and radically thrown back to our own bodies and connected to the bodies of others.In conversation with artists and theorists from different fields, the contributers to this volume explore different acts of suffocation and release. They show how the protection of bodies is unequally and ambivalently distributed and how it can be an act of resistance. It is an insistence on life, a demand for existential, political, symbolic and ethical recognition.

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Book SynopsisWhile the so-called material turn in the humanities and the social sciences has inspired a vibrant discourse on objects, things, and the concept of materiality in general, less attention has been paid to materials, particularly in cultural studies scholarship. With each of its chapters taking a particular material as its point of departure, this volume offers a palette of fresh approaches to materials within the realm of cultural studies. The contributors call for a materials-based perspective on culture, which has become all the more pertinent by the need for sustainability in times of climate change, energy crisis, conflict, migration, and the lingering coronavirus pandemic.

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Book SynopsisIn this remarkable book, David-Emil Wickström traces the transcultural flow of popular music production emanating from St. Petersburg, a central hub of the Russian music scene. With a specific focus on the post-Soviet emigrant community in Germany and their event 'Russendisko', Wickström -- himself a trumpet player in two local bands -- explores St Petersburg's vibrant music scene, which provides an electrifying platform for musical exchange. The findings shed a new light on Soviet and post-Soviet popular music history and even Russia's relationship to Ukraine. Wickström demonstrates the filtering processes embedded in transcultural flows and how music is attributed new meanings within new contexts. This innovative book not only promotes a deeper understanding of the role of popular music in society, it also enables a better comprehension of cultural processes in the second decade after the fall of the Soviet Union.

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Book SynopsisThis book offers an interdisciplinary and multicultural approach to fiction, reality, and narrativity applied to television series from all over the world. Dissecting the almost invisible barrier between fiction and reality in TV series from various perspectives, the chapters cover a wide range of contemporary classics from the post-network age. From "The X-Files" and "Desperate Housewives" to "The Wire" and "Breaking Bad", the chapters sketch TV series' development from the lowest form of mass entertainment to the sophisticated vehicle of highbrow intertextuality on a global scale. Also covering many international cases from Brazil, Serbia, Romania, and Turkey and locating them in the global web of puzzle narratives, the unique contributions draw connections between the most diverse audiences and the way they receive modern storytelling in a culturally globalised world. This timely volume is a great resource for anyone interested in contemporary mass culture.Trade Review"The new perspectives offered by this volume are of great interest for any European and International scholar mainly because the volume brings to light new ideas, new methodologies and results that could be further developed. Furthermore it is outstanding that the contributors to this book come from different countries (UK, Germany, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania) and somehow reach a common language in their studies." -- Michael Higgins, University of Strathclyde, UK"The book is divided into 14 chapters that bring a new perspective on the study of television series. This allows readers to drill in, even if they are not senior researchers, to easily digest the content and also to acknowledge the impact of television series viewing on reality and on their own lives." -- Stamatis Poulakidakos, University of Athens, Greece

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Book SynopsisThis book offers an interdisciplinary and multicultural approach to fiction, reality, and narrativity applied to television series from all over the world. Dissecting the almost invisible barrier between fiction and reality in TV series from various perspectives, the chapters cover a wide range of contemporary classics from the post-network age. From "The X-Files" and "Desperate Housewives" to "The Wire" and "Breaking Bad", the chapters sketch TV series' development from the lowest form of mass entertainment to the sophisticated vehicle of highbrow intertextuality on a global scale. Also covering many international cases from Brazil, Serbia, Romania, and Turkey and locating them in the global web of puzzle narratives, the unique contributions draw connections between the most diverse audiences and the way they receive modern storytelling in a culturally globalised world. This timely volume is a great resource for anyone interested in contemporary mass culture.Trade Review"The new perspectives offered by this volume are of great interest for any European and International scholar mainly because the volume brings to light new ideas, new methodologies and results that could be further developed. Furthermore it is outstanding that the contributors to this book come from different countries (UK, Germany, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania) and somehow reach a common language in their studies." -- Michael Higgins, University of Strathclyde, UK"The book is divided into 14 chapters that bring a new perspective on the study of television series. This allows readers to drill in, even if they are not senior researchers, to easily digest the content and also to acknowledge the impact of television series viewing on reality and on their own lives." -- Stamatis Poulakidakos, University of Athens, GreeceTable of ContentsDoes the cultural capital compensate for the cultural discount? Why do German students prefer US-American TV series?, by Daniela Schluetz and Beate Schneider Awake, or the multiplication of the realities Contemporary Television Series: Narrative Structures and Audience Perception, by Mathieu Pierre "Three hundred channels and nothing's on": Metaleptic Genre-Mixing in Supernatural, by Michael Fuchs Appreciating Nietzsche in Episodic Drama: The Highbrow Intertextuality and Middlebrow Reception of Criminal Minds, by Michael Wayne The Seed of an Idea and its Cognitive Field: Minding the Gap of Alternate Reality in Flash Forward and Fringe, by Inbar Kaminsky Breaking Narrative: Narrative Complexity in Contemporary Television, by Oliver Kroener The Walking Dead and the Truly Monstrous... on Television, by Atene Mendelyte Television Cosmo-Mythologies: The Return to Mythological Naratives in Television Fiction, from The Prisoner to Lost, by Raquel Crisostomo Galvez and Enric Ros Zofio Breaking Bad, a Character-Based Formula, by Rodrigo Mesonero Representing Occupations in Media and Audience Perceptions of TV Series, by Valentina Marinescu Homeland: War on Terror Revisited, by Marc Perello-Sobrepere Understanding Health in Grey's Anatomy Television Series, by Bianca Mitu Fiction Television in Brazil: New Perspectives, by Lilian Fontes Moreira TV Series Bolji zivot (1987-1991): View from the Future, by Natasa Simeunovic Bajic The X-Factor of Singing Competitions TV Series, by Maria Dicieanu TV Drama as a Narrative form: Scenes from a Gendered and a Sacralized Cultural Sphere in Turkish Society, by Nuran E. Isik The hero's journey, by "Maria Teresa Nicolas Gavilan, Lourdes Lopez Gutierrez,Carmen Silvia Sanchez Arana, Tania Alejandra Benitez Sanchez" About the contributors

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Book SynopsisWhen Samuel Becketts work first appeared, it was routinely described, by Adorno amongst others, as a clear example of European high culture. However, this judgement ignored an aspect of Becketts work and its reception that is, arguably, not yet fully understood; the intimate relation between his work and popular culture. Beckett used popular cultural forms; but popular culture has also found a place both for the work and for the man. This collection of essays examines how popular cultural forms and media are woven into the fabric of Becketts works, and how Beckett continues to have far-reaching impact on popular culture today in a host of different forms, in film and on television, from comics to meme culture, tourism to marketing.

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