Popular Culture Texts Research Articles

Situated Readings

As we write this, the 10 November 2024 release date of the highly anticipated second half of the fifth, and final, season of Taylor Sheridan’s epic neo-Western drama, Yellowstone, lies on the horizon. Within the space of eight years, Sheridan’s series, initially a niche standalone drama picked up by the Paramount Network, has expanded into a large, shared story universe. The contributions to this issue have coalesced around several focus areas which can loosely be categorised as: branding; gender and race; space and place; and situated readings of the series. This special issue of Journal of Literary Studies is, to our knowledge, the first focused publication to critically consider Yellowstone, and it successfully establishes a first critical discussion about the transcultural exchanges that can be found in popular cultural texts such as this that manage to go well beyond their intended boundaries.

Exploring the Affordances of Vernacular Digital Games in Developing 21st-Century Skills

The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented surge in technological advancements and an exponential growth in mobile device ownership world-wide. Such transformations have intensified access to digital content, opening up new avenues for non-formal learning. This was particularly true during subsequent crises such as the COVID-19 Pandemic and natural and man-made disasters which have disrupted formal learning and left many learners immobilised. This paper contends that capitalising on the intersection of formal and non-formal learning experiences is integral to innovative planning and value-added education. To dismiss engagement in non-formal leaning transactions is to exclude a significant part of learners’ cognitive processes, preferences and experiences. In particular, this paper focuses on vernacular digital games as an apt example of pervasive technology and a non-formal learning arena. Described as a popular culture text, vernacular games are originally intended for entertainment, as opposed to pedagogical, purposes. However, embedded in their designs are social and developmental affordances that render them potent tools for serendipitous learning and dynamic spaces for developing competencies. In the light of this, this paper proposes a move from gamification, i.e. adding a gaming layer to non-gaming contexts, to adding an educational layer to non-formal digital gaming contexts. To consolidate this proposal, it investigates the 21st-century competencies reportedly acquired and developed through digital gameplay. It also delves into possible design-related paradoxes. More precisely, the paper reflects on how key game design features such as multimodality, adaptivity, cultural narratives and affinity spaces can be harnessed to better cultivate much in-demand 21st-century skills. Although learning skills (in their metacognitive form of higher-order thinking) are part and parcel of 21st-century skills, literacy skills and life skills are equally important. The further longer-term aim is to map development opportunities and optimise learning in ways that are in harmony with today’s changing scenarios, demands and objectives.

Fertile Ground

Yellowstone is an American, contemporary Western primetime television series which has evolved into a cultural phenomenon. In this article, we critically read purposive samples from this popular cultural text through the prism of the plaasroman (Afrikaans farm novel), a seminal subgenre in Afrikaans literature. Through an analysis of a range of tropes, we identify similarities between these seemingly disparate genres in terms of the representation of the Boer and Frontier myth, ownership and belonging, centre-periphery dichotomies, and identity. The value of this analysis is two-fold: First, it lies in what such a comparative analysis reveals about the contemporary moment in both a local and transnational context. The resurgence of nostalgic yearning for a particular brand of patriarchal, heteronormative, conservative, rural simplicity in the narratives of Yellowstone is read against the background of farm, and land, as depicted in the plaasroman. This is relevant given that there is a similar propensity for nostalgia in certain South African contexts which takes the form of appropriations of the construct of the Afrikaner Boer imaginary and the concomitant utopian farm ideal. Second, and perhaps more importantly, we argue that analysing Yellowstone from the theoretical vantage point of the plaasroman, which originates from a minor language and literary system, inverts the ways in which Global North genre-lenses are usually used to read Global South genres. The research follows a controlled case comparison approach and, building on a deep description of the plaasroman, presents an analysis and interpretation of Yellowstone’s first season.

A Kingdom of Possibility

A Kingdom of Possibility

Self-knowledge, self-regulation and ambivalence: the production of female desire in the US-UK popular cultural imaginary

ABSTRACT This article examines how media texts are curbing and conditioning female desire in the contemporary US-UK cultural moment. It analyses eight popular cultural texts: fictional TV shows Sex/Life (2021-), Wanderlust (2018), Gypsy (2017), film Hello, My Name is Doris (2015); factual TV shows Sex, Love & Goop (2021) and The Principles of Pleasure (2022); short story Cat Person (2017); and non-fiction book Three Women (2019). These media call on women to identify and regulate their desires in ways that sustain patriarchal ideals of femininity. Celebrations of female sexuality as a vehicle for self-knowledge are tied up in psychological, physiological and medicalised discourses which pathologise female desire in a binary of low/excessive, or confused and complex. Such discourses mask sexual trauma and present female sexual liberation as a reparative solution to violence. However, transformative understandings of desire as unknowable, contextual and culturally conditioned, which allow for a reworking of gendered relations, also emerge. Bringing together philosophical, psychological and popular debates on female desire with cultural representation, the article concludes that representations largely ignore the relationality of desire as always located within the violence of gender, race and class power structures.

Fighting Hate and Hate Speech: Raising Anti-Hate Awareness through Critical Analysis of Popular Cultural Texts on an Undergraduate Course

Central to the understanding of hate is an apprehension of the complexities of various hate-motivated social attitudes, which include Othering and the production of social, economic, and political hierarchies of domination. While hate speech is endemic both online and offline in contemporary society, Korean youths have difficulties recognizing its structural forces. The present study aims to offer an instructional model of a college-level course for identifying and countering hate in everyday life. As participants in this course, students read popular cultural texts thematizing hate, wrote critical reviews, and held group discussions to develop anti-hate critical thinking and raise awareness about online hate speech and hate-motivated social behavior. They showed significant progress in the surveys, which measured anti-hate critical thinking, as well as during the course, as they proceeded from observing and identifying hate speech to formulating and articulating proactive strategies to challenge it. This study provided an opportunity for college students to develop good citizenship in reading hate speech and representations of hate in popular cultural texts with a critical eye, and to reflect on the problem of hate in society.

The Vacillating Imagination of ‘Us' in Black Panther (2018)

This article analyzes the cultural politics of the vacillating imagination of “us” represented in Black Panther, released in 2018. This popular cultural text centralizes Blackness in that it refers to instances of Black oppression in the early 1990s. Amid the contradiction between the film's Black-centered content and the form of the Hollywood superhero genre, the imagination of “us” in the film expands and shrinks. Drawing on concepts developed by Fredric Jameson and Étienne Balibar, including imaginary resolution, utopian potential, ideological containment, and equaliberty, this article critically examines the ideologies in the text. When it comes to the expansion of “us,” the article explores the utopian potential in the representation of the radical villain. In terms of the shrinkage of “us,” it investigates the function of ideological containment in the Hollywood superhero movie by focusing on the representation of the hero, and the portrait of South Korea as a spectacular background.

Cyber-ludic pedagogies: towards a post-critical methodology of video games as cultural sites

In this paper, we explore contradictions in the uneven movements of engaging video games in learning, and the affective deployment of play as a strategic mechanism to guarantee institutional and civic compliance. To that purpose, we are tracing the links between positivist, evaluative paradigms in Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) scholarship, arguing that a linear assessment of knowledge transmission does not adequately engage the complexity of virtual worlds and the learning processes they mobilize. As a response, we propose a cyber-ludic pedagogical framework that embeds gamers’ knowledge-production practices and performances in the wider social context they occupy, acknowledging their hybridity as digital and physical experiences. We apply this framework to a case-study reading of a vlog entry performed as a humorous guide to social distancing at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our reading recognizes the operationalization of knowledge communication modes as tropes while emphasizing discrete projects of brand awareness, identity formation, and claims to digital space. Our analysis of the vlog performance of what we term ‘technodeviance’ serves to de-exoticize the deviant in educational research; problematize the assumption of one-way knowledge transmission and representation; and center the pedagogical value of game and play data that is found in popular culture texts and in user-generated content.

“The Thunder Rolls and the Lightning Strikes”: Pathetic Fallacy as a Multimodal Metaphor

Pathetic fallacy (hereafter PF) has received varied definitions by educators, scholars, and literary critics. Pager-McClymont created a model of PF based on a survey of English teachers, using a checklist of stylistic tools and foregrounding theory. The model views PF as a specific type of conceptual metaphor: a master metaphor, and defines it as a projection of emotions from an animated entity onto the surroundings. Three indicators of PF were identified: imagery, repetition, and negation. Furthermore, multiple effects of PF were observed, such as conveying suspense through surroundings, particularly thunder and lightning. In this paper, I explore if Pager-McClymont’s model of PF can be applied to texts from popular culture, such as the television show RuPaul’s Drag Race, the film Clue, and the song “The Thunder Rolls”. The analysis employs McIntyre’s multimodal stylistic methodology to the texts’ transcripts and focuses on the multimodal presentation of PF’s criteria and indicators. Findings show that PF’s effects are present in popular culture texts and contribute to enriching suspense, thus making Pager-McClymont’s model of PF applicable to everyday entertainment.

Art, artifice, and eroticized infantilization: Imagining Japanese femininities in the Weimar Republic in Fritz Lang's Harakiri (1919) and Kapitän Mertens's “Kio, die lasterhafte Kirschblüte” (1924)

AbstractThis article focuses on the ways in which a Japan‐specific Orientalism regarding Japanese femininities establishes itself in Weimar Germany's popular culture. In this period of German democratization in which we observe Weimar women's social, sexual, and political liberation, I propose that popular culture texts such as Fritz Lang's film Harakiri (1919) and Kapitän Mertens's magazine publication “Kio, die lasterhafte Kirschblüte” (1924) created an alternative fantasy engaging with contemporary anxieties and dreams. I read the depiction of Japanese femininities as a mediation of predominantly heterosexual male fears about the liberation movement of modern Weimar women as circulated in mass media. In developing this reading, I observe a simultaneity of three different imagined Japanese femininities: aestheticized artificialization/reification, eroticization, and infantilization. I argue that the narrative construction of such ultimately subservient exotic, doll‐like figures is diametrically opposed to the widely studied New Woman of Weimar and thus warrants further inquiry.

Understanding transnational decontextualization-recontextualization through Shingeki no Kyojin: The perils and possibilities surrounding Japanese manga and anime

ABSTRACT Japanese anime has continued to gain recognition as one of the strongest cultural influences in a globalized world. We examine how the transnational process of decontextualization-recontextualization can shift the messages of popular culture texts as situated in differing collective memories. To highlight this process, we analyze Shingeki no Kyojin (known to English-speaking audiences as Attack on Titan). Shingeki no Kyojin provides insightful grounds for analysis given its tremendous popularity in both Japan and beyond, its message of resistance against U.S. militarism, and its recontextualized uptake by the American alt-right, even including an Arizona congressman. Our analysis reveals the importance of understanding popular culture alongside context and the impact of decontextualized-recontextualized transformations of meaning on transnational processes of collective memory discourse.

Independent learner as the ideal – normative representations of higher education students in film and television drama across Europe

ABSTRACT This article explores the normative representations of higher education students in seven films and television series from four European countries. Drawing on the concept of the ‘independent learner’ as an ‘ideal construction’, I demonstrate how these texts offer complex and at times paradoxical representations of who gets positioned as the ‘ideal’ student. Popular culture texts, such as those analysed here, I argue, contribute to framing normative understandings of students. As examples of public pedagogy, these representations have significant ramifications for the popular understanding of what it means to be a student in contemporary higher education.

“My Little Influencer”

“My Little Influencer”

When Queer Emotions Meet the Constitutional Promise

In classical constitutionalism, constitutional courts are dedicated guardians of the law, acting to promote fundamental rights. However, during an anticipated transition to democracy after the 2019 general election, substantial changes occurred in the pattern of judgments by the Constitutional Court of the Kingdom of Thailand (CC). These happened amidst popular demand for a democratic regime based on the rule of law. By squeezing heteronormative and royalist-nationalist ideologies into its legal reasoning, the CC has violated the constitutional rights of Thai citizenry and created a normative cosmos in which all forms of otherness are disregarded. This article reads a utopian fantasy of Thainess in the Constitutional Court Decisions Nos. 19/2564 and 20/2564 in tandem with selected popular cultural texts on concepts of dystopian constitutionalism and queer jurisprudence. The goal is to analyze how disenfranchised voices neglected by the Court’s metanarrative may express queer negative emotions such as anger and fear, disclose the downside of constitutional promise, and offer playful readings of constitutional ideas and practices as Thailand struggles to attain the popular definition of constitutionalism.

“Oh, that pesky DNA”: Using murder-mystery narratives to identify, evaluate, and organize arguments

Utilizing popular murder-mystery texts that transcend boundaries of race, class, age, and sex, students apply Toulmin’s 1958 concept of claim, data, warrant (Toulmin, S. E. 2003. The uses of argument. Cambridge University Press). Ultimately, students engage in an activity that demonstrates how argumentation plays a role outside of the college classroom writing assignment. Courses: Introduction to Communication, Argumentation and Debate, Rhetorical Theory, Critical Analysis, and Communication writing courses. It is also applicable to secondary K-12 courses. Objective: The aim of this activity is to introduce concepts of argumentation, including organization of information within written work, evaluation of argumentative data/evidence, and articulation of a well-supported claim. It is designed to help students recognize (1) how they analyze argumentative messages in their daily lives, specifically by focusing on a popular culture text, and (2) how organization of an argument is structured, with the goal of clearly communicating a message to the audience.

The Message, the Medium and the Means of Argumentation: Towards a More Holistic Approach to the Rhetorical Criticism of Television News Reports

ABSTRACTThis paper argues for developing a more holistic approach to the rhetorical analysis to understand the persuasive communicative work being done by television news as rhetors replicating and performing popular culture. The essay argues that studies on the rhetoricality of television news reports tend to either focus on the reports’ messages through an analysis of the content or consider the medium on which the reports are aired or the form of these texts. As such, there appears to be a gap in postulating how the content, the medium and the argumentation schemes employed in television news reports come together to engage in persuasive communicative work. Given the status of television news reports as popular culture texts, theories need to be developed to make meaning of their representations of society’s most dominant practices and perspectives.

تداخل مسميات اساليب الترجمة واثرها في اللغة العربية ودراسات الترجمة

Some translation methods overlap to the extent that they are an unnecessary proliferation of terms. The aim of this study therefore is twofold: Firstly, it examines four methods of translation (literal translation, overt translation, semantic translation, and direct translation). The study finds that these methods overlap to different degrees. While semantic and overt methods of translation apply similar features, literal translation has subtle differences from semantic and overt methods of translation. Direct Translation has more distinctive features than the other three methods. Secondly, the study examines the names for these methods in the Arabic language and shows how the Arabic terms overlap to a large extent, which is confusing to Arab practitioners. The study therefore suggests other names for the methods to minimize their overlap and increase their practicality. تفترض هذه الدراسة التداخل الكبير لبعض اساليب الترجمة، لدرجة انهم يشكلون توزيع غير ضروري لمسميات هذه االساليب. ينقسم هدف هذه الدراسة الى شقين. االول: دراسة اربع انواع من اساليب الترجمة(الترجمة الحرفية، الترجمة الظاهرة، الترجمة الداللية، الترجمةالمباشرة.) وجدت الدراسة ان هذه االساليب تتداخل بدرجات متفاوتة. حيث تنطبق على الترجمة الداللية والظاهرة الكثير من الصفات المتشابهة. في حين هناك اختالفات حاذقة بين الترجمة الحرفية والترجمة الداللية والواضحة.بينما للترجمة المباشرة سمات مميزة تختلف عن اساليبالترجمة الثالثة االخرى.ركز الشق الثاتي من الدراسة على اسماء هذه االساليب باللغة العربية. حيث ان المسميات العربية لهذه االساليب تتداخل بشكل كبير، وتشكل مصدرا لالرباك للعديد من ممارسين المهنة. لذلك قامت هذه الدراسة باقتراح اسماء اخرى لهذه االساليب للحد من نسبة تداخلها وزيادة عمليتها

Popular culture texts in education: The effect of tales transformed into children's media on critical thinking and media literacy skills

This study focuses on the effect of using postmodern tale films, which are based on the transformation of a text and enable multiple reading, as an educational tool on critical thinking and media literacy skills. In the study, which was structured as an embedded mixed design in order to achieve this aim, qualitative data were embedded in the experimental intervention and it was aimed that one data type play a supporting role for the other. The study group consists of 43 students studying at the 7th grade in an official secondary school in the province of Mus, in the fall semester of the 2021–2022 academic year. During the 8-week application period, while activities designed with media contents including the transformation of tales were practiced in the experimental group (n = 21), activities in the current Turkish textbook were practiced in the control group (n = 22). In this period, “critical thinking skills test” developed by Eğmir and Ocak (2016), “media literacy scale sensitive to entertainment purpose” developed by the authors, semi-structured interview forms, and semi-structured observation form were used as data collection tools. It was concluded that the application designed with activities in which media contents containing tale transformations were used made a significant difference in favor of the experimental group on critical thinking and media literacy skills of students. In addition to this, observations made during these activities and products created by students showed that reflective and creative thinking skills were also positively affected in relation to critical thinking and media literacy skills. Quantitative data showing the results of these effects are supported by qualitative data helping to understand in which direction and how these effects occur.

The View from here – Teaching ‘Popular’ Nationalism in English

Abstract This essay situates the academic enquiry into the ‘popular’ idea of the nation within the shifting disciplinary contours of English in India. Using the iconic Bharatbala music video ‘Vande Mataram’ (1998) as a case study, it demonstrates how methods of analysis derived from literary studies may be used to engage with the mediated nature of contemporary culture; the classroom experience of ‘reading’ together a popular cultural text reflects as well as instantiates the expansion of ‘English’ at the level of both content and form. The collaborative pedagogic exercise of decoding the ‘signs’ that constitute the audio-visual text through familiar literary terms such as imagery, symbolism, setting and character reveals how the cultural discourse of nationalism – in terms of its historical legacy as well as its current political resonance – can be ‘read’ contextually using disciplinary methods of ‘English’. I argue that the ‘literary’ can no longer be defined only in terms of the nature of the text one brings into the classroom – it is a mode of analysis that can be extended to examining cultural texts in other media formats too, especially if the enterprise of ‘doing’ English in a formal, academic set-up is to be anything more than a reiteration of the value of Anglo-American canonical literature. If the English canon has traditionally been a means of teaching students how to ask fundamental questions about cultural representation, the same aim is now achieved also through the use of texts from other, more familiar and local contexts and media.

Introduction


 
 
 In the spring of 2021, when academic work was still mostly virtual due to COVID-19 pan- demic measures, we celebrated the foundation of PopMeC—an academic association dedi- cated to US popular culture studies—organizing a virtual conference on the Gothic and its widespread presence in contemporary popular culture. With the idea of bringing a fresh ap- proach to online events and the traditional keynote format, the 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture conference involved a series of interviews with renowned scholars working in the field of Gothic studies, who discussed various aspects of contemporary expressions and functions of the Gothic in popular culture texts. The interviews were carried out between February and April 2021, and the original recordings can be found on YouTube.1 Given the kind availability of our keynotes, we decided to compile the tran- scripts—edited by the interviewees and interviewers themselves in order to give them a pub- lishing shape—in this special issue. This collection follows the publication of REDEN vol. 3, no. 1 (2021), which contained a special dossier exploring the presence and different expres- sions of gothic modes in contemporary US popular culture.