When Death Goes Pop

When Death Goes Pop PDF Author: Charlton D. McIlwain
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820470641
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Scholars, educators, health professionals, and activists from a variety of fields have struggled with one of the most significant questions of contemporary life: How do we rescue the experience of death and dying from the mire of fear, denial, and secrecy that it has been associated with for the better part of a century? In When Death Goes Pop, Charlton D. McIlwain describes a striking emerging shift in the way that death is represented in such omnipresent forms of media as television - a shift that seems to be moving the American discourse on death and dying from the private sphere to the public. The book surveys the past thirty years of death-related television programming, from daytime soaps to prime-time dramas, focusing primarily on Home Box Office's Six Feet Under and its innovative approach to the subject, and from the Sci-Fi Channel's Crossing Over to the genre of paranormal programming as a whole. This book also discusses the increasing use of multimedia and the Internet in the funeral industry and how the new technologies change the way that we remember the dead as they create and sustain what we might call a «virtual community of death».

When Death Goes Pop

When Death Goes Pop PDF Author: Charlton D. McIlwain
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820470641
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scholars, educators, health professionals, and activists from a variety of fields have struggled with one of the most significant questions of contemporary life: How do we rescue the experience of death and dying from the mire of fear, denial, and secrecy that it has been associated with for the better part of a century? In When Death Goes Pop, Charlton D. McIlwain describes a striking emerging shift in the way that death is represented in such omnipresent forms of media as television - a shift that seems to be moving the American discourse on death and dying from the private sphere to the public. The book surveys the past thirty years of death-related television programming, from daytime soaps to prime-time dramas, focusing primarily on Home Box Office's Six Feet Under and its innovative approach to the subject, and from the Sci-Fi Channel's Crossing Over to the genre of paranormal programming as a whole. This book also discusses the increasing use of multimedia and the Internet in the funeral industry and how the new technologies change the way that we remember the dead as they create and sustain what we might call a «virtual community of death».

When Law Goes Pop

When Law Goes Pop PDF Author: Richard K. Sherwin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226752914
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
"When Law Goes Pop" is an examination of legal practice in today's world, one that should be needed by everyone concerned with the future of our legal system and the meaning we invest in it.

Knowledge Goes Pop

Knowledge Goes Pop PDF Author: Clare Birchall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000189864
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
A voice on late night radio tells you that a fast food joint injects its food with drugs that make men impotent. A colleague asks if you think the FBI was in on 9/11. An alien abductee on the Internet claims extra-terrestrials have planted a microchip in her left buttock. 'Julia Roberts in Porn Scandal' shouts the front page of a gossip mag. A spiritual healer claims he can cure chronic fatigue syndrome with the energizing power of crystals . . . What do you believe? Knowledge Goes Pop examines the popular knowledges that saturate our everyday experience. We make this information and then it shapes the way we see the world. How valid is it when compared to official knowledge and why does such (mis)information cause so much institutional anxiety? Knowledge Goes Pop examines the range of knowledge, from conspiracy theory to plain gossip, and its role and impact in our culture.

The Social Construction of Death

The Social Construction of Death PDF Author: Leen Van Brussel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113739191X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Chapter 12 of this book is open access under a CC BY license. Well-established scholars from a variety of disciplines - including sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies, and political sciences – use the social construction of death and dying to analyse a wide variety of meaning-making practices in societal fields such as ethics, politics, media, medicine and family.

Envisaging Death

Envisaging Death PDF Author: Michele Aaron
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443864196
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying enters the expanding field of Death Studies and connects some of its key interpretive frameworks – such as issues of internment practice, trauma, or end of life care – to visual culture, and, more than that, to visual culture’s socio-political, geographic and aesthetic specificities. Where the prevailing picture of death within this field is as a Western experience framed by its denial on one side and its sensationalism on the other, this collection confronts the specifics of death’s marginalisation: its experience as local rather than universal, and the precise relationship between the context and the cultural mediation of death. Who and where you are – which part of the world you live in, whether you are famous or wealthy, subject to “natural” catastrophe, civil unrest or high-tech healthcare – has enormous influence on how your death is marked, imaged and imagined. As such, this book addresses the socio-cultural factors permeating and styling the visual and inevitably material treatment of death and dying in a broad array of personal and national settings. “Advanced” society has been characterised by an increased distancing of death from the everyday, and its distortion or invisibility within the public sphere. The essays collected here return some shape and context, and geo-politics, to the treatment of death and dying within contemporary culture, and specifically within contemporary visual culture which provides an ever more dominating forum for society’s depiction of and dealings with death. Charting important new interdisciplinary terrain, scholars and practitioners from a wide range of fields address an assortment of cultural mediations of real, fictional or fictionalised death. They navigate, in different ways, the fraught, policed, but always relative, distance between the living and the dead which characterises these mediations, a distance which works, inevitably, to reassure and re-secure those supposedly untouched by death and dying. Envisaging Death, whether through discussion of the cemetery landscape, the still or moving image, the therapeutic or educational art practice, addresses how such a distance is reinforced. It also, crucially, explores countless cases of, and increasing possibilities for, the disruption of this distance. With the various crises of current times, be they economic, environmental or regional, such possibilities for this disruption, and the altered dynamics of human connection that they represent, can only gain in significance.

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.

Television/Death

Television/Death PDF Author: Helen Wheatley
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474451756
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
Television/Death intertwines the study of death, dying and bereavement on television with discussion of the ways that television (and the TV archive) provides access to the dead. Section One looks at the representation of death, dying and the afterlife on television, in historical and contemporary factual television (from around the world) and in US television drama. Section Two focuses on dramas of grief and bereavement and discusses how the long form seriality and narrative complexity of television, from family melodramas to the ghost serial, allows for an emotionally realist representation of experiences of grief, bereavement and death-related trauma. Finally, Section Three proposes that television has been overlooked in critical analyses of recorded sounds' and images' propensity to 'bring back the dead'. It argues that television is the posthumous medium par excellence and looks at how the dead return via incorporation into new television programmes or through projects to bring television out of the archive.

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.

Death in the Modern World

Death in the Modern World PDF Author: Tony Walter
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1526480085
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Death comes to all humans, but how death is managed, symbolised and experienced varies widely, not only between individuals but also between groups. What then shapes how a society manages death, dying and bereavement today? Are all modern countries similar? How important are culture, the physical environment, national histories, national laws and institutions, and globalization? This is the first book to look at how all these different factors shape death and dying in the modern world. Written by an internationally renowned scholar in death studies, and drawing on examples from around the world, including the UK, USA, China and Japan, The Netherlands, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. This book investigates how key factors such as money, communication technologies, economic in/security, risk, the family, religion, and war, interact in complex ways to shape people’s experiences of dying and grief. Essential reading for students, researchers and professionals across sociology, anthropology, social work and healthcare, and for anyone who wants to understand how countries around the world manage death and dying.

Emotion, Identity and Death

Emotion, Identity and Death PDF Author: Chang-Won Park
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317144678
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Death affects all aspects of life, it touches our emotions and influences our identity. Presenting a kaleidoscope of informative views of death, dying and human response, this book reveals how different disciplines contribute to understanding the theme of death. Drawing together new and established scholars, this is the first book among the studies of emotion that focuses on issues surrounding death, and the first among death studies which focuses on the issue of emotion. Themes explored include: themes of grief in the ties that bind the living and the dead, funerals, public memorials and the art of consolation, obituaries and issues of war and death-row, use of the internet in dying and grieving, what people do with cremated remains, new rituals of spiritual care in medical contexts, themes bounded and expressed through music, and more.