Author: Eva Illouz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520917995
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
To what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens? In her unique study of American love in the twentieth century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of images that define our ideas of love and romance, revealing that the experience of "true" love is deeply embedded in the experience of consumer capitalism. Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of clichés and images she calls the "Romantic Utopia." This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage. Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliché of romance—from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses—is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all. Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America.
Author: Carol Appadurai Breckenridge
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816623068
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
The book aims to illustrate that what is distinctive about any particular society is not the fact of its modernity, but rather its own unique debates about modernity. Behind the embattled arena of culture in India, for example, lie particular social and political interests such as the growing middle class, the entrepreneurs and commercial institutions, and the state. The contributors address the roles of these various intertwined interests in the making of India's public culture, each examining different sites of consumption. The sites which are explored include cinema, radio, cricket, restaurants and tourism. The book also makes distinct the differences among public, mass and popular culture.
Author: John Storey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032067285
Category : Books and reading
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
"Consuming Utopia builds on critical insights into consumption and utopianism developed in two previous books by the author to elaborate what it means to read utopian fiction (including dystopian and anti-utopian) from the critical perspective of cultural studies. With a critical focus on social practices of reading rather than on the text itself, John Storey advances a timely and relevant contribution to existing debates on utopian fiction, offering new insights into how we might understand the politics of utopian fiction. Finding readership and readers indispensable to the act of producing politics beyond the text, Storey argues that if utopian fiction has a 'politics', it is determined by those who, in actuality, pick up books and act on what they read, rather than readers proposed by textuality. By engaging with seminal concepts in cultural studies, this book shows how reading utopian fiction works to make the meaning of such texts material and social, and therefore available for politics. An essential addition to the literature on utopian fiction, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the areas of cultural studies, literary studies, comparative literature, cultural politics, utopian studies, and political theory"--
Author: Thomas More
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 113
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Book Description
Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.
Author: Jorge León Casero
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031534913
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
Author: John Storey
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000683907
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
This book provides a clear and wide-ranging overview of consumption as a sociological concept. Arguing that consumption is both an unavoidable part of life and an ongoing dialectical process, it gives a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption and the possibilities these frameworks can offer. Consumption is something we all do. It is not just another word for shopping. When we eat and drink, or when we read a book or watch TV, or visit an art gallery or spend an evening in a pub, we are consuming. There is not ‘a world of consumption’ that some of us do not enter. We are all consumers and consumption must be regarded as an important sociological concept as a result. Consumption is also connected to notions of ‘agency’ - what people do, rather than what is done to them or made available to them for their doings. Before the critical focus on consumption, it was assumed that the meaning and use of things was dictated by how they were produced or by their simple mute materiality. Focusing on consumption challenges this way of thinking: rather than the mute and predictable end point of production, it is rethought as an activity, a process, something we do that involves use and meaning. It is how most of us intervene in culture. This thought-provoking yet accessible book offers a valuable introduction of the concept of consumption for researchers and undergraduate and postgraduate students in a range of fields within the humanities and social sciences, including sociology, history, anthropology, English, media and cultural studies.
Author: Jan Plamper
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191040487
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561
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Book Description
The history of emotions is one of the fastest growing fields in current historical debate, and this is the first book-length introduction to the field, synthesizing the current research, and offering direction for future study. The History of Emotions is organized around the debate between social constructivist and universalist theories of emotion that has shaped most emotions research in a variety of disciplines for more than a hundred years: social constructivists believe that emotions are largely learned and subject to historical change, while universalists insist on the timelessness and pan-culturalism of emotions. In historicizing and problematizing this binary, Jan Plamper opens emotions research beyond constructivism and universalism; he also maps a vast terrain of thought about feelings in anthropology, philosophy, sociology, linguistics, art history, political science, the life sciences—from nineteenth-century experimental psychology to the latest affective neuroscience—and history, from ancient times to the present day.
Author: Michael Hviid Jacobsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000034097
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
This volume explores the nature of nostalgia as an important emotion in contemporary society and social theory. Situated between the ‘sociology of emotions’ and ‘nostalgia studies’, it considers the reasons for which nostalgia appears to be becoming an increasingly significant and debated emotion in late-modern culture. With chapters offering studies of nostalgia at micro-, meso- and macro-levels of society, it offers insights into the rise to prominence of nostalgia and the attendant consequences. Thematically organised and examining the role of nostalgia on an individual level – in the lives of concrete individuals – as well as analysing its function on a more historical social level as a collective and culturally shared emotion, Nostalgia Now brings together the latest empirical and theoretical work on an important contemporary emotion and proposes new agendas for research. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, psychology and cultural studies with interests in the emotions.
Author: Jess Scully
Publisher: Pantera Press
ISBN: 1925700771
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 451
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Book Description
It's hard to be excited about the future right now. Climate change is accelerating; inequality is growing; politics is polarised; institutions designed to protect us are strained; technology is disrupting the world of work. We need to upgrade the operating systems of our society. Jess Scully asks, What can we do? The answer is: plenty! All over the world, people are refusing the business-as-usual mindset and putting humans back into the civic equation, reimagining work and care, finance and government, urban planning and communication, to make them better and fairer for all. Meet the care workers reclaiming control in India and Lebanon, the people turning slums into safe havens in Kenya and Bangladesh, and champions of people-powered digital democracy in Iceland and Taiwan. There are radical bankers funding renewable energy in the USA and architects redesigning real estate in Australia, new payment systems in Italy and the Philippines that keep money in local communities, and innovators redesigning taxation to cut pollution and incentivise creative solutions. Glimpses of Utopia is a call for optimism. Humans everywhere are rising up to confront our challenges with creativity, resilience and compassion. Harnessing technology and imagination, we can reshape our world to be fair and sustainable. This book shows us how.
Author: Lauren Rosewarne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317581423
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
The focus of this book is on the media representations of the use of the Internet in seeking intimate connections—be it a committed relationship, a hook-up, or a community in which to dabble in fringe sexual practices. Popular culture (film, narrative television, the news media, and advertising) present two very distinct pictures of the use of the Internet as related to intimacy. From news reports about victims of online dating, to the presentation of the desperate and dateless, the perverts and the deviants, a distinct frame for the intimacy/Internet connection is negativity. In some examples however, a changing picture is emerging. The ubiquitousness of Internet use today has meant a slow increase in comparatively more positive representations of successful online romances in the news, resulting in more positive-spin advertising and a more even-handed presence of such liaisons in narrative television and film. Both the positive and the negative media representations are categorised and analysed in this book to explore what they reveal about the intersection of gender, sexuality, technology and the changing mores regarding intimacy.
