Age Of Mass Culture Research Articles

Performative Memories

Performative Memories

Prosthetic Memories in <em>The Sopranos</em>

Prosthetic Memories in <em>The Sopranos</em>

Wandering in the City: Time, Memory, and Experience in Digital Game Space

Wandering in the City: Time, Memory, and Experience in Digital Game Space

The Unruly Emotions of the Execution Crowd and its Critics in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century France

From the 1860s to the 1910s, a host of commentators sounded off on the degraded spectacle of the public execution in France. They had little to say about the violence of capital punishment as such. The problem that haunted them was the crowd that gathered around the guillotine. In these years the execution crowd was a mystery and an obsession, the object of literary surveillance, parliamentary inquiry, scientific study, and journalistic examination. These commentators saw a crowd without dignity, a crowd full of unhealthy emotions, a crowd of morbid curiosity and misplaced revelry. Who was this crowd? What emotions did its participants feel at the spectacle of punishment? And what can this story tell us about the public execution – or, more generally, the public – in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France? The outcry over the execution crowd reveals more about the commentators than about the crowd. The guiding emotions of these commentators had little to do with empathy, civilization or distaste for violent punishment; they had everything to do with disgust for the crowd on the streets and fears of the public in a new age of mass culture.

Blood on Boylston: Digital Memory and the Dramatisation of Recent History in <em>Patriots Day</em>

Blood on Boylston: Digital Memory and the Dramatisation of Recent History in <em>Patriots Day</em>

Racial ideology as elite discourse: Nordicism and the visual in an age of mass culture

ABSTRACTNordicism promoted a particular racial-bodily aesthetic, that of the tall, blond, blue-eyed individual, and promoted the view that the Nordic race was responsible for all the major achievements of humanity. However, modern “scientific” race theory recognized that there were no pure races, and few racially pure individuals. This complicated the presentation of racial ideas in the public sphere. In inter-war Germany and during the Nazi period, racial imagery played a crucial role in mediating between academic race theory and popular racial propaganda, between racial elitism and political populism. At the macro-historical level, this ideal human aesthetic appears in post-Second World War advertising and in Hollywood movies, and in the imagery associated with social-democratic Scandinavia. Nordic iconography today indexes racist elitism, idealized figures in the social imaginary, and egalitarianism.

Time-sculptures of terrifying ambiguity: staging ‘inner space’ and migrating realities in Analogue’s Living Film Set

ABSTRACTThis article examines Analogue’s Living Film Set, an interactive theatre piece which uses miniature film sets, multi-touch surface technology and live video feeds to reframe my semi-remembered memories from the mid-1980s as a collective participatory experience. Drawing on new wave novelist J. G. Ballard’s notion of childhood memory as ‘time-sculptures of terrifying ambiguity’ [Ballard, J. G. 1963. “Time, Memory and Inner Space.” J. G. Ballard website (originally published in The Woman Journalist Magazine). Accessed August 6, 2015. http://www.jgballard.ca/non_fiction/jgb_time_memory_innerspace.html], I will demonstrate how my childhood town of Shepperton has been overwritten in both Ballardian literary fiction and the incursion of cinematic artifice from the neighbouring activities of Shepperton Film Studios. I argue that the ambiguity of my recollections and the contamination of my lived history with ‘prosthetic memories’ [Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 20–21.] has provided a creative space to re-enact the blended hyperreality of my early childhood through the work’s intermedial form. I will conclude by examining how the shifting reality status of the media used within the performance intersects with the notion of ‘time-sculptures’ and problematises what Carol Martin [(2013). Theatre of the Real. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.] has identified as ‘theatre of the real’.

Post-Wall German Cinema and National History, Utopianism and Dissent by Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien (review)

Reviewed by: Post-Wall German Cinema and National History, Utopianism and Dissent by Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien Regine Criser Post-Wall German Cinema and National History, Utopianism and Dissent. By Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Pp. 348. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1571135223. With the sudden collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989, the already charged debates about Germany’s national identity became even more complicated. In her recently published monograph, Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien argues that through the events that brought the postwar era and the Cold War world order to an end, 1989 replaced 1945 as the primary caesura in modern German history. Hence, she takes 1989 as the starting point for her investigation of history films produced over the next 20 years until 2009 and approaches them as a crucial discursive network with a decisive impact on the ongoing construction of national identity in Germany. Expanding Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory (Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. [2004]), O’Brien sets out to investigate “how history films help viewers to comprehend the dynamics of change, agency, and passivity that play an equally important part in historical understanding” (16). Based on her extensive research of post-wall German cinema, she arrives at the conclusion that utopianism and dissent function as prominent models for the creation of a German identity after 1989. O’Brien’s monograph contributes to a growing number of publications in the field of German Studies that all approach contemporary German cinema as a crucial cultural institution that actively shapes and participates in the creation of a national identity tied together through overarching historical narratives. Despite some overlap with regard to movie selection with recent publications such as Nick Hodgin’s Screening the East: Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in Film (2011) or Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood’s edited volume New Directions in German Cinema (2011), O’Brien leaves these predecessors unaddressed. This is especially noteworthy, since Cooke and Homewood share a similar starting point with O’Brien in that both publications challenge Eric Rentschler’s claim that post-Wall cinema is a “cinema of consensus” (“From New German Cinema to Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus.” In Cinema and Nation, edited by Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, 260–77 [2000]). A possible reason for these publications’ absence among O’Brien’s otherwise extensive disciplinary and interdisciplinary references could be that Cooke and Homewood’s movie selection is limited to films produced in the 2000s, thus starting significantly later than her own selection, and that Hodgin’s analysis focuses on the notion of nostalgia. In contrast, in her first chapter O’Brien argues for the concept of anamnesis over nostalgia, arguing that in approaching the immediate aftermath of 1989 and the collapse of socialism movies employ tropes of amnesia and imprisonment to address sudden historic change. The four chapters of the monograph are organized around conceptual clusters that guide and establish coherence between [End Page 480] O’Brien’s expert readings of individual movies. In addition to amnesia and anamnesis, the chapters circle around political oppression and resistance, terrorism in East and West Germany, as well as utopianism and violence. While the well-written individual chapters are convincing on their own, these thematic and theoretical clusters connect the cinematic analysis throughout the book and create a narrative and argumentative flow that underscores the thoroughness of O’Brien’s scholarship. Throughout the four chapters she convincingly demonstrates how the GDR and its sudden collapse, the student movement of 1968 as well as German Terrorism, most famously embodied by the RAF, are all equally unresolved episodes of Germany’s national history. By bringing these historic flashpoints and their filmic representations in dialogue with each other, O’Brien successfully points to cinematic trends and shifts and highlights the thematic interplay between individual historic events and their cultural conversions. As O’Brien shows, the void of utopianism after multiple failed experiments with social and ideological alternatives to capitalism have left Germany with yet another challenge in the already difficult undertaking of creating a national identity. The strength of O’Brien’s monograph is twofold: firs of...

Self-Publishing: Opportunities and Threats in a New Age of Mass Culture

Developments in vanity presses, electronic publishing and social media have led to outstanding growth in the publishing industry. Eighty percent of people believe they have a book in them and the opportunities provided by new technologies are responding to their needs. This raises important questions: What effect will these developments have on the industry? In this environment, is quality control feasible? How will potential readers find their treasure? Will book publishing remain a cost-effective activity? We will examine the publishing industry looking for the answers to these questions and may just find that things are not as bleak as we initially thought.

American Literature in the Age of Mass Culture

American Literature in the Age of Mass Culture

Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification

This essay explores the ethical and political dimensions of what I have elsewhere called “prosthetic memories” (Landsberg, Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture, Harvard University Press, 2004), focusing on those that are produced and disseminated cinematically. I argue that cinematic technology, by which I mean also to include the dominant cinematic conventions and practices used in the Hollywood style of filmmaking, is an effective means for structuring vision. Through specific techniques of shooting and editing, films attempt to position the viewer in highly specific ways in relation to the unfolding narrative. Sometimes, in such films, viewers are brought into intimate contact with a set of experiences that fall well outside of their own lived experience and, as a result, are forced to look as if through someone else’s eyes, and asked to remember those situations and events as both meaningful and potentially formative. By engaging specific strategies intended to elicit identification, films can force viewers to engage both intellectually and emotionally with another who is radically different from him or herself. This complicated form of identification across difference might condition viewers to see and think in ways that could foster more radical forms of democracy aimed at advancing egalitarian social goals.

“The Best of Me Is There”: Emerson as Lecturer and Celebrity

By definition, celebrities exist in public as an association of physical traits or projected values. Celebrity was problematic for Emerson in three areas. First, celebrity heightened Emerson's anxieties about his friendships and intimate relationships. Emerson's relative comfort in the public arena of the lecture hall, as compared with the private arena of intimate relationships, carries mixed results when attention to his body rather than his ideas becomes the focus of his success. Second, celebrity accentuates the tension between interest in public persons and the social conformity that Emerson consistently urges his readers to shun. Third, celebrity's attention to the physical person leads to misinterpretations of Emerson's lectures. From the first generation of Emerson's biographers forward, critics have disparaged contemporary audiences as insensitive to the complexities of his lectures. This essay, however, considers the possible uses of the celebrity for the culture that both created and mistook him. Viewed in the light of Emerson's celebrity, misinterpretation of his lectures reveals his audiences' appreciation for intellectual accomplishment and their desire for the spiritual uplift brought by physical proximity to “genius.” In addition, because Emerson's celebrity encouraged a range of interpretations of his cultural relevance, it required individuals to examine Emerson's reputation for themselves, and it thereby fostered the kind of self-reliant thinking that Emerson himself advocated. Emerson's case reveals that, in an age of mass culture, the ability to interpret celebrities' significance is a key to critical thinking and a valuable form of literacy.

Which prosthetic? Mass media, narrative, empathy, and progressive politics

While Alison Landsberg's argument for a politically progressive prosthetic memory made possible by modern media and global capital is theoretically provocative and politically appealing, it is ultimately unsustainable. What she describes as memory might better be called a combination of knowledge and empathy. And her account of the prosthetic quality of movies and experiential museums is equally applicable to more traditional verbal texts and, indeed, to symbol use per se. Nevertheless, Landsberg's book (Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Columbia University Press, 2004) presents a valuable new way of thinking about the problem of representing and responding to events one did not experience.

Why should historians write about the nature of history (rather than just do it)?

Why do historians write (express?) history? Via a personal introduction the author explores the nature of memory and locates Alison Landsberg's book (Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Columbia University Press, 2004) within the historian's understanding and engagement with memory, intertextuality, and epistemic choice. Locating Landsberg's book as unique within the exploration of memory by means of a comparison with R. G. Collingwood and contemporary examples of historical expression, inevitably raises questions concerning truth, what it is and where it comes from.

Review: Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, by Alison Landsberg

Review: <i>Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture</i>, by Alison Landsberg

'A body without a head': The Idea of Mass Culture in Dickens's American Notes (1842)

'A body without a head':The Idea of Mass Culture in Dickens's American Notes (1842) Juliet John (bio) I would rather have the affectionate regard of my fellow men, than I would have heaps and mines of gold. But the two things do not seem to me incompatible. – Dickens, Speech at Boston Dinner (1 February 1842) 1 A touchstone of debate in modern cultural theory is the idea of a tension between the goals of commercial culture and those of a genuinely 'popular' culture consonant with the values and interests of the populace.2 Speaking in America at the dawn of 'the first age of mass culture', Dickens, like notable recent commentators, did not see this tension as inevitable.3 He rightly assumed that a statement of belief in a model of culture that was both capitalist and communal would meet with approval in nineteenth-century America. At this stage of his first trip to the States of 1842, expectations were still high that there would be a perfect meeting of minds between Dickens, the literary superstar associated with democratic, populist values, and America, a New World founded on the principles of 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness'. Before reaching the States, Dickens had written to the editor of the New York Knickerbocker Magazine of 'the glow into which I rise, when I think of the wonders that await us'.4 One leading article published during his stay explained that Dickens was a hero for the Americans because of the 'democratic genius' and 'idea of human equality' that they shared. America was a place 'where his popular tendencies' were 'not likely to be weakened', and his writings would 'hasten on the great crisis of the English Revolution (speed the hour!) far more effectively than any of the open assaults of Radicalism or Chartism'.5 But as has been well documented, Dickens and America became mutually dis-ffected during his first visit. Rather than confirming Dickens's radicalor egalitarian tendencies, America had the opposite effect: 'This is not the Republic of my imagination', he memorably wrote to Macready. [End Page 173] 'I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy'((22 March 1842); Letters: III, 156). To Forster, he famously announced: I tremble for a radical coming here, unless he is a radical on principle,by reason and reflection, and from the sense of right. I fear that if hewere anything else, he would return home a tory … […] I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be dealt by this country, in thefailure of its example to the earth. ((24 February 1842); Letters : III, 90) Dickens's disillusionment with America has been explained in various ways. For Jerome Meckier, 'Dickens discovered his real selfin 1842', a self that was 'more English and Victorian after visiting America'.6 For Michael Slater, by contrast, 'Dickens was a natural American' who 'had just the same love/hate relationship with America as he had with the country of his birth'.7 In a related vein, David Parker argues that, 'For Dickens America was an unflattering glass'.8 Slaterand the editors of the Pilgrim edition of Dickens's Letters pinpointthe change in Dickens's attitude to America to the aftermath of the14 February 'Boz Ball' – an extravagant Ball in his honour in New York – after which, he was confined to his hotel room with illness for three days (15–17 February).9 During this time, he was able to reflect on attacks on him in the press for the ostentatious way in which he was being fêted and the public stance he had taken urging America to sign up to an international copyright agreement (the lack of which meant that Dickens's works could be reprinted without permission or payment in America). Mercenary motives were attributed to Dickens and it was even suggested in some quarters that the entire trip was motivated by a desire to promote a copyright agreement, accusations to which Dickens took great offence (Letters: III, x). This article differs from existing readings by explaining Dickens's change of heart about America in terms that go beyond the auto-biographical, and in a...

Readers’ Forum Introduction: Popular Culture and the Culture of Research Funding

THIS READER'S FORUM GOT ITS START because of an article written by Robert Fulford for the National Post on 13 October 2007 about SSHRC (The Social Science and Humanities Research Council) and the work of Dr Jes Battis. The article, Lex Luthor Hearts Superman: Your Tax Dollars at Work, takes SSHRC to task for not revealing much about its research proposals, then moves on to mock Dr Battis for doing research on popular culture and queer issues, and ends by criticizing Dr Battis's success at earning grants. Fulford even supplies the fact that Dr Battis wrote about soy milk and corn muffins on his blog as some kind of evidence that he is not a good scholar. It is easy to be annoyed by Fulford's predictable attack on SSHRC (what a waste of tax dollars!) and to be disturbed by his extended attack on Jes Battis as a person and as a scholar (cornbread! muffins! piercings! queer stuff!). It's more puzzling to see him get upset about research on popular culture--and in its parent discipline, cultural studies--if only because one of his recent books, The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture (1999) discusses popular culture at length, including the films of D. W. Griffiths, the culture of gossip, and Jack Nicholson, among other topics. Clearly, it's not the objects of popular culture which have attracted Fulford's ire since he writes about these himself, but popular culture research influenced by the politics of cultural studies, which aims to critique the conservative values Fulford holds dear. Fulford chooses to cloak that discussion of politics in contempt for the subject matter, and that's where things get really interesting. Fulford's strategy of expressing contempt for studies of popular culture on the one hand while writing about popular culture seriously on the other isn't so different from the position of popular culture in the humanities and social sciences today. Doing research and teaching on popular culture is seen in some academic quarters as a guilty pleasure, but it is not a pleasure which creates real research or substantial teaching, or which--until the recent creation of the cultural studies category for SSHRC Standard Research Grants--deserves funding. Fulford's hiding of ideology behind a contempt for everyday objects that he finds banal when he's not talking about them finds an uneasy parallel in the world of research and teaching, where emergence of popular culture as a field within cultural studies is accompanied by worries about its possible banality, its threat to serious fields, even the fact that popular culture is, well, popular with students and the general public too. And anything popular cant be all that educational, can it? It isn't only Fulford who gets exercised at the thought of articles about Buff, the Vampire Slayer: The general response to the Oprah Winfrey Show and Oprah's Book Club in the popular press is equally dismissive and hostile about Oprah Winfrey's choice of books (even when they are classically literary) and about the way readers in Oprah's Book Club choose to read and interpret. Recent scholarship on Oprah's Book Club is creating a more complex idea of what it is to be a participant on the show and what the selections themselves can mean. …

Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture

Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture

Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture

Introduction: Memory, Modernity, Mass Culture1. Prosthetic Memory2. The Prosthetic Imagination: Immigration Narratives and the 'Melting Down' of Difference3. Remembering Slavery: Childhood, Desire, and the Interpellative Power of the Past4. America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: The 'Object' of RememberingEpilogue: Towards a Radical Practice of Memory

Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture

Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture