Death in Contemporary Popular Culture

Death in Contemporary Popular Culture PDF Author: Adriana Teodorescu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429589336
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
With intense and violent portrayals of death becoming ever more common on television and in cinema and the growth of death-centric movies, series, texts, songs, and video clips attracting a wide and enthusiastic global reception, we might well ask whether death has ceased to be a taboo. What makes thanatic themes so desirable in popular culture? Do representations of the macabre and gore perpetuate or sublimate violent desires? Has contemporary popular culture removed our unease with death? Can social media help us cope with our mortality, or can music and art present death as an aesthetic phenomenon? This volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of the social, cultural, aesthetic, and theoretical aspects of the ways in which popular culture understands, represents, and manages death, bringing together contributions from around the world focused on television, cinema, popular literature, social media and the internet, art, music, and advertising.

The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture

The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture PDF Author: Dina Khapaeva
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472130269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Popular culture has reimagined death as entertainment and monsters as heroes, reflecting a profound contempt for the human race

Death, The Dead and Popular Culture

Death, The Dead and Popular Culture PDF Author: Ruth Penfold-Mounce
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1787430537
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Portrayals of death and the dead are everywhere within popular culture revealing much about contemporary society’s engagement with mortality. Drawing upon celebrity posthumous careers, organ transplantation mythology and the fictional dead, this book considers how representations of the dead in popular culture exert powerful agency.

Death in Contemporary Popular Culture

Death in Contemporary Popular Culture PDF Author: Adriana Teodorescu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429589336
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
With intense and violent portrayals of death becoming ever more common on television and in cinema and the growth of death-centric movies, series, texts, songs, and video clips attracting a wide and enthusiastic global reception, we might well ask whether death has ceased to be a taboo. What makes thanatic themes so desirable in popular culture? Do representations of the macabre and gore perpetuate or sublimate violent desires? Has contemporary popular culture removed our unease with death? Can social media help us cope with our mortality, or can music and art present death as an aesthetic phenomenon? This volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of the social, cultural, aesthetic, and theoretical aspects of the ways in which popular culture understands, represents, and manages death, bringing together contributions from around the world focused on television, cinema, popular literature, social media and the internet, art, music, and advertising.

Man-Eating Monsters

Man-Eating Monsters PDF Author: Dina Khapaeva
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1787695298
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
What role do man-eating monsters - vampires, zombies, werewolves and cannibals - play in contemporary culture? This book explores the question of whether recent representations of humans as food in popular culture characterizes a unique moment in Western cultural history and suggests a new set of attitudes toward people, monsters, and death.

Of Corpse

Of Corpse PDF Author: Peter Narvaez
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Laughter, contemporary theory suggests, is often aggressive in some manner and may be prompted by a sudden perception of incongruity combined with memories of past emotional experience. Given this importance of the past to our recognition of the comic, it follows that some "traditions" dispose us to ludic responses. The studies in Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture examine specific interactions of text (jokes, poetry, epitaphs, iconography, film drama) and social context (wakes, festivals, disasters) that shape and generate laughter. Uniquely, however, the essays here peruse a remarkable paradox---the convergence of death and humor.

The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture

The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture PDF Author: Dina Khapaeva
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472122622
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture investigates the emergence and meaning of the cult of death. Over the last three decades, Halloween has grown to rival Christmas in its popularity. Dark tourism has emerged as a rapidly expanding industry. “Corpse chic” and “skull style” have entered mainstream fashion, while elements of gothic, horror, torture porn, and slasher movies have streamed into more conventional genres. Monsters have become pop culture heroes: vampires, zombies, and serial killers now appeal broadly to audiences of all ages. This book breaks new ground by viewing these phenomena as aspects of a single movement and documenting its development in contemporary Western culture. This book links the mounting demand for images of violent death with dramatic changes in death-related social rituals. It offers a conceptual framework that connects observations of fictional worlds—including The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and the Harry Potter series—with real-world sociocultural practices, analyzing the aesthetic, intellectual, and historical underpinnings of the cult of death. It also places the celebration of death in the context of a longstanding critique of humanism and investigates the role played by 20th-century French theory, posthumanism, transhumanism, and the animal rights movement in shaping the current antihumanist atmosphere. This timely, thought-provoking book will appeal to scholars of culture, film, literature, anthropology, and American and Russian studies, as well as general readers seeking to understand a defining phenomenon of our age.

The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication and Popular Culture

The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication and Popular Culture PDF Author: Christina S. Beck
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104026624X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication and Popular Culture offers rich insights into the ways in which communication about health through popular culture can become a part of healing, wellness, and health-related decisions. This Handbook allows readers to understand and consider messages that inform and influence health-related choices through pop culture in the public sphere. Written in an accessible narrative style and including interdisciplinary, global, and diverse perspectives, a vast team of contributing authors from the field explores the intersections between health communication and popular culture. The Handbook is divided into five parts: Framing of Health-Related Issues in Popular Culture; Exploring Popular Culture Influences on Health Behaviors and Beliefs; Considering Pro-Social Public Health Interventions in Popular Culture; Understanding Health Issues in Popular Culture from Diverse Perspectives; and Pop Culture and Health Communication: Looks to the Future. The Handbook will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Communication Studies, Health Communication, Public Health Policy, Media Literacy, and Cultural Studies.

Latinx Representation in Contemporary Popular Culture and New Media

Latinx Representation in Contemporary Popular Culture and New Media PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004708693
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This volume provides a partial mapping of the ambivalent representational forms and cultural politics that have characterized Latinx identity since the 1990s, looking at literary and popular culture texts, as well as new media expressions. The chapters tackle themes related to the diversity of Latinx culture and experience, as represented in different media the borderland context, issues related to gender and sexuality, the US–Mexico borderland context, and the connections between spatiality and Latinx self-representation—sketching the “now” of Latinx representation and considering that “Latinx” is an unstable signifier, and the present, as well as culture and media, are always in motion.

The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture

The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture PDF Author: Justin Edwards
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136337873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary collection brings together world leaders in Gothic Studies, offering dynamic new readings on popular Gothic cultural productions from the last decade. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: contemporary High Street Goth/ic fashion, Gothic performance and art festivals, Gothic popular fiction from Twilight to Shadow of the Wind, Goth/ic popular music, Goth/ic on TV and film, new trends like Steampunk, well-known icons Batman and Lady Gaga, and theorizations of popular Gothic monsters (from zombies and vampires to werewolves and ghosts) in an age of terror/ism.

If We Must Die

If We Must Die PDF Author: Aimé J. Ellis
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814336655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Investigates a variety of texts in which the self-image of poor, urban black men in the U.S. is formed within, by, and against a culture of racial terror and state violence. In If We Must Die: From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls, author Aimé J. Ellis argues that throughout slavery, the Jim Crow era, and more recently in the proliferation of the prison industrial complex, the violent threat of death has functioned as a coercive disciplinary practice of social control over black men. In this provocative volume, Ellis delves into a variety of literary and cultural texts to consider unlawful and extralegal violence like lynching, mob violence, and "white riots," in addition to state violence such as state-sanctioned execution, the unregulated use of force by police and prison guards, state neglect or inaction, and denial of human and civil rights. Focusing primarily on young black men who are depicted or see themselves as "bad niggers," gangbangers, thugs, social outcasts, high school drop-outs, or prison inmates, Ellis looks at the self-affirming embrace of deathly violence and death—defiance-both imagined and lived-in a diverse body of cultural works. From Richard Wright's literary classic Native Son, Eldridge Cleaver's prison memoir Soul on Ice, and Nathan McCall's autobiography Makes Me Wanna Holler to the hip hop music of Eazy-E, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., and D'Angelo, Ellis investigates black men's representational identifications with and attachments to death, violence, and death—defiance as a way of coping with and negotiating late-twentieth and early twenty-first century culture. Distinct from a sociological study of the material conditions that impact urban black life, If We Must Die investigates the many ways that those material conditions and lived experiences profoundly shape black male identity and self-image. African Amerian studies scholars and those interested in race in contemporary American culture will appreciate this thought-provoking volume.