Description
Book SynopsisPop culture emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century as a reaction to the restrictive social traditions of colonial America. It spread quickly and broadly throughout the bustling urban centers of the 1920s—an era when it formed a partnership with technology and the business world. This coalition gave pop culture its identity, allowing it to thrive and form alliances with artistic and literary movements. But pop culture may have run its course with the rise of meme culture. This publication revisits the social, psychic, and aesthetic roots of pop culture, suggesting that meme culture has fragmented its historical flow, thus threatening to bring about its demise.
Table of ContentsMemes and the Future of Pop Culture Marcel Danesi Abstract Keywords 1 Introduction 2 Origins 3 The Protestant Ethic 4 The Roaring Twenties 5 Theorizing Pop Culture 6 Technology and the Marketplace 7 Literary-Artistic Bricolage 8 Carnival, Archetype, and Mythology Theories Revisited 9 Sociobiology and the Theory of Memes 10 Meme Culture 11 The Simulacrum 12 Meme Culture versus Pop Culture 13 The “Communal Brain” 14 The Global Village 15 The “Corso” and “Ricorso” of History 16 The Tetrad 17 The Future References
