Popular Entertainment Research Articles

Freeing the Press from Editorial Discretion and Hegemony in Bona Fide News: Why the Revolution Must Be Televised

Broadcast journalism’s foundational role of informing and engaging the American public in order to further America’s self-governing democracy is in crisis. Corporate broadcast owners’ efforts to maximize profits and increase advertising revenue during traditional network news and related public affairs programming have led to the closing of many investigative and correspondent television news bureaus and have arguably hastened the devolution of broadcast journalism into a depoliticized spectacle filled with political and celebrity, gossipdriven infotainment. 1 Furthermore, as viewers have abdicated their reliance on broadcast journalism as their primary source of political knowledge, they have also disengaged from professional broadcast journalists’ dispassionate, impartial and aspirationally objective method and manner of presentation. 2 This Article contends that these definitional shifts in viewer engagement, which serve as underlying challenges to broadcast journalism’s deliberative role, are the symptoms, rather than the root cause of its deliberative peril. These shifts are instead the net effect of long-standing mainstream societal norms and presumptions that led to the narrowing in scope and definition of civic engagement. Specifically, such mainstream norms presume a disengagement between civic knowledge and participation on the one hand, and the various expressive modes (and whims) of popular culture, entertainment and discourse on the other. This assumption of a necessary disjuncture between reason and emotions, particularly with pleasure, was reflected in traditional news programming formats and personified by professional broadcast journalists during the Golden Age of

The bitter taste of payback: the pathologising effect of TV ‘revengendas’

The thirst for vengeance is a timeless subject in popular entertainment. One need only think of Old Testament scripture; Shakespeare's Hamlet; Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill or the TV series Revenge, and we immediately conjure up images of a protagonist striving to seek justice to avenge a heinous wrong committed against them. These texts, and others like it, speak to that which is ingrained in our human spirit about not only holding others responsible for their actions, but also about retaliation as payback. This article seeks to problematise the way the popular revenge narrative effectively constructs the vendetta as a guilty pleasure through which the audience can vicariously gain satisfaction, while at the same time perpetuates law's rhetoric that personal desires for vengeance are to be repressed and denied. In particular, the article will demonstrate the way such popular revenge narratives contribute to the pathologising of human desire for payback.

Gendered and Endangered Musical Artefacts: Owner-bound Popular Sheet-music Albums in Jazz-age Australasia

The article considers owner-bound albums of popular songs as gendered cultural artefacts within the context of 1920s modernity and music technology, focusing on two women's albums from New Zealand. Such albums, which continued a tradition from the previous century, arguably represent a somewhat different engagement by women with popular music in this era than that represented by the archetypal jazz-age flapper. The individualized selection of songs in the albums demonstrates their importance as a site for identity construction that maintained a social place for popular music away from the jazz palais, the dance band and the gramophone. The albums also foreground the significance of an ‘Australasian’ connection in popular music and entertainment as part of a wider global Anglo-American sphere of popular culture.

White Roots, Grey Flowers? Multiple Conceptions of Early Australian ‘Jazz’ and Pre-‘Jazz' History

Jazz history has largely been documented by individuals with deep respect and affection for the tradition, or a particular aspect of it. Their perspective has therefore often been aesthetic, qualitative and retrospective—who played the most ‘authentic’, virtuosic or innovative jazz and what were the black musical roots of the self-aware (if aesthetically divided) jazz movement that was manifest throughout the western world by the late 1930s? Consequently, the narrative of early jazz, in particular, is often reduced to a rigid pantheon of (mostly) male (mostly) African-American ‘Greats’, as epitomized in the controversial 2001 Ken Burns mega-documentary, Jazz. This article explores the different ways in which early Australian jazz-related history has been constructed by examining the perspectives or frames of reference adopted by Australian amateur and professional scholars, including collector-discographers, who have contributed to research into the ‘roots’ of what was perceived to be ‘jazz’ in Jazz Age (1918–1928) Australia. In examining the outcomes of their research, the article demonstrates that, far from being mysteriously transplanted from black New Orleans culture around 1918 like some exotic plant in a pot, so-called ‘jazz' and ‘jazzing’ in Jazz-Age Australia was largely the product of African-American-inflected white American and British popular entertainment, dancing and dance music trends, grafted onto a colonial history of blackface minstrelsy and the 1910s craze for Irving-Berlin-style ragtime song and dance music.

Forensic oratory and the jury trial in nineteenth-century America

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the American jury trial was a form of popular amusement, rivalling the theatre and often likened to it. The jury's ability to find law, as well as facts, was widely if inconsistently defended. These features were consistent with a view of forensic oratory that emphasized histrionics, declamation and emotionally charged rhetoric as means of legal persuasion. By the end of the century, judges had gained more control of the law-finding power and various questions of fact had been transformed into questions of law. Many of the details that would have aided the lawyers’ dramatic efforts were screened out by a host of new exclusionary rules. These changes in forensic style may have helped to facilitate the decline of the trial, by reorienting its function away from a broadly representative one and towards one that emphasized dispassionate analysis in the service of objectivity.

Wilde Words: The Aesthetics of Crime and the Play of Genre in E. W. Hornung's Raffles Stories

E. W. Hornung's Raffles stories bring together several key nineteenth-century cultural currents, including major changes in emerging genres and the nature of the fin-de-siècle marketplace. They were a great success as popular entertainment, but they also deserve sustained critical attention because of the quality of the writing at a less ephemeral level than the merely escapist. Ludic, allusive and metafictive, the stories benefit by being read with and against influential nineteenth-century texts—in particular Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray—in terms of their revisionist interplay with the idea of the aesthetic “hero” and a subversive relationship to aestheticism. My analysis is written within, and indebted to, the changing nature of Victorian studies, in which popular fiction is being recognized as fundamental to the range and cultural significance of the literature of the nineteenth century. Neglected or “minor” writers were significant agents of change and experimentation within a period that thrived on the buying power (and seemingly insatiable textual appetite) of ordinary readers and on the more rarefied energies of experimentation and hybrid forms.

Imagining adventure in Middlebrow fiction: Cosmopolitan Novels by Maurice Dekobra and Johan Fabricius

The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of a new type of novel that straddled the divide between popular entertainment and legitimate culture by combining ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary forms and catering en masse for the tastes of an expanding middleclass reading public. In this article we want to explore the ways in which the novels La Madone des sleepings (1925) by the bestselling French novelist Maurice Dekobra and Venetiaansch avontuur [Venetian adventure] (1931) by the Dutch author Johan Fabricius fit into this broad category of the middlebrow novel and how their use of adventure as a structural devise might complicate the common view of the middlebrow novel as a form of domestic realism.

Imagining adventure in Middlebrow fiction: Cosmopolitan Novels by Maurice Dekobra and Johan Fabricius

The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of a new type of novel that straddled the divide between popular entertainment and legitimate culture by combining ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary forms and catering en masse for the tastes of an expanding middleclass reading public. In this article we want to explore the ways in which the novels La Madone des sleepings (1925) by the bestselling French novelist Maurice Dekobra and Venetiaansch avontuur [Venetian adventure] (1931) by the Dutch author Johan Fabricius fit into this broad category of the middlebrow novel and how their use of adventure as a structural devise might complicate the common view of the middlebrow novel as a form of domestic realism.

Demons of discord down under

The 1918-19 vaudeville act called 'Australia’s First Jazz Band' is the most appropriate metaphor for the commencement of an ‘Australian jazz’ tradition where this tradition is considered from the present-day perspective of a self-aware, long established Australian jazz movement. Yet improvisatory African-American-inflected antecedents of jazz can be traced back at least to the first colonial Australian performance of the blackface minstrel song and dance act Jump Jim Crow in 1838 and though blackface and, later, African-American minstrel show music and dance and two decades of ragtime music and dance before 'Australia’s First Jazz Band'. Taking its cue from Bruce Johnson's statement that early ‘jazz’ in Australia was an example of an ‘oppositional subculture’ that led back to our foundation criminality and ‘took over the spirit of convict and treason songs’(Johnson, 2004: 9), the article seeks to show that a continuum of African-American-inflected popular entertainment and its performance practices from Jump Jim Crow to Australia’s First Jazz Band functioned as the 'medium' for an oppositional 'spirit' that combined globalized oppositional values with others that are, arguably, traceable to colonial 'foundation criminality'.

Sham Marriages and Proper Plots: Henry Fielding's Shamela and Joseph Andrews

This essay explores Henry Fielding's development of the marriage plot in Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742). Surveying theatrical echoes in these works, which are particularly apparent in their marriage plots, I make the case that Fielding's first two novels are clearly indebted to his former career as a dramatist in the London stage of the late 1720s and early 1730s. I argue that, in writing Shamela and Joseph Andrews, Fielding was responding to Samuel Richardson's Pamela in a way that corresponded to how his plays were reactions to other popular theatrical entertainments of his time. This complicates the conventional critical view that it was Richardson's first novel, with its outstanding popularity, which drove Fielding to propose a radically opposite model for fiction writing.

Scientific ethos and the cinematic zombie outbreak: Science in fictional narratives

Public anxiety about emerging biothreats is evident in the recent glut of popular entertainment where the demise, or near demise, of humankind is imagined to be the result of a new infectious pathogen against which science has no existing vaccine or cure. This article examines the figure of the scientist in such fictional narratives and what these characterizations indicate about public attitudes toward science in our contemporary world. It focuses in particular on the image of the scientist as clumsy naïve, immoral experimenter, heroic savior, and self-reflexive ethical agent. &nbsp

Zombification

Spam appears everywhere on the Internet, from downloaded emails to server-based blogs, forums and social media communications. This article explores this notion of the living dead in the context of spam culture. How is spam actively and repetitively produced with different identities? I adopt the term ‘zombie’ to describe spam because, notably, the concept of zombies has been used extensively in popular culture and entertainment, such as films, games and literature to describe the phenomenon of mindless slaves. They are usually situated in an environment that has suffered a viral outbreak with contagious effects. Critiques have compared zombies to dead labour, such as the slavery in Haiti and the labour in the United States: that is, the exploitation of labour through the concept of alienation, from Marx’s theory, and labour practices in global capitalism. Within the context of spam production, as datafied phenomenon, this paper uses the figure of the zombie to describe the computational and network processes of spam automation, which I call ‘zombification’ — alluding to the broader topic of datafication and its consequences. The assumption here is that life once datafied is zombification.

Jessie Matthews’ Construction of a Star Persona on her Post-war Australian Tours

Jessie Matthews’ post-war tours to Australia were part of a sequence of commercially successful imported productions then heralded as a great boom era in Australian theatre. However, Matthews’ waning popularity in Britain since the 1940s meant that she was no longer recognizable as the screen darling of the 1930s. Indeed, the Australian press had to remind its readers of ‘evergreen Jessie’s’ succession of British film hits such as The Good Companions (1933) and Evergreen (1934). This article examines the critical and public reception of Matthews’ tours with a focus on the strategic management of her star persona, both on and off stage, including her public criticism of Australian theatre management and employment opportunities for Australian theatre performers. Martina Lipton is an Honorary Associate Lecturer at the University of Queensland and was recently the Research Fellow (Australia) on the Leverhulme Research Project ‘British-Australian Cultural Exchange: Live Performance 1880–1960’. Her publications include the chapter ‘Localism and British Modern Pantomime’ in A World of Popular Entertainments (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) and articles for Australasian Drama Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly, and Popular Entertainment Studies.

Forensic Oratory and the Jury Trial in Nineteenth-Century America

The institution of the jury underwent radical change in the United States during the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, the jury trial was a form of popular amusement, rivaling the theater and often likened to it. The jury’s ability to find law, as well as facts, was widely if inconsistently defended. The trial’s role as a source of entertainment, and the jury’s ability to nullify, were consistent with a view of forensic oratory that emphasized histrionics, declamation, and emotionally charged rhetoric as means of legal persuasion. By the end of the century, judges had gained more control of the law-finding power, and various questions of fact had been transformed into questions of law. Many of the details that would have aided the lawyers’ dramatic efforts were screened out by a host of new exclusionary rules. The overall effect was to afford less scope for lawyers' emotional excesses — and to make those performances seem disreputable and outmoded. As an institution, the trial continued to figure significantly in American culture through the first three decades of the twentieth century. Numerous factors conspired to weaken the trial’s prominence after that time. Although these changes in forensic style have not usually been considered as a part of that narrative, they may have helped to facilitate the decline of the trial, by reorienting its function away from a broadly representative one, and towards one that emphasized dispassionate analysis in the service of objectivity and technical exactitude, appealing to a rather different community, made up of professional lawyers and those laypersons who could appreciate their values.

Text-aware balloon extraction from manga

Manga, a Japanese word for comics, is a worldwide popular visual entertainment. Nowadays, electronic devices boost the fast development of motion manga for the purpose of visual richness and manga promotion. To convert static manga images into motion mangas, text balloons are usually animated individually for better story telling. This needs the artists to cut out each text balloon meticulously, and therefore it is quite labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach that can extract text balloons from manga images both accurately and effectively. Our approach starts by extracting white areas that contain texts as text blobs. Different from existing text blob extraction methods that only rely on shape properties, we incorporate text properties in order to differentiate text blobs from texture blobs. Instead of heuristic parameter thresholding, we achieve text blob classification via learning-based classifiers. Along with the novel text blob classification method, we also make the first attempt in trying to tackle the boundary issue in balloon extraction. We apply our method on various styles of mangas and comics with texts in different languages, and convincing results are obtained in all cases.

The Geological Characterization of Landscape in Major TV Series: A Suggested Approach to Involve the Public in the Geological Heritage Promotion

The characterization of natural and cultural heritage using popular entertainment, such as TV movies and series, can become an effective and original way to involve society in protecting territory and enhancing local development, thanks to the dissemination of knowledge. The aim is to make the complex aspects of landscape related to its geological and ecological assessment understandable to the public. The tools here proposed are the episodes of the TV series “Inspector Montalbano” filmed in Sicily. The stories, written by Andrea Camilleri, are located in Sicily (the biggest Italian island in the southern Mediterranean Sea), in particular with some World Heritage Sites. The natural and cultural landscapes, which provide fascinating scenery to the films, represent a meaning in the representation of the plot. At the same time, if recognized and understood, they become part of the cultural heritage of each component of the local community and of society. The cognitive process activates a virtuous circle revitalizing the links between humanity and environment. Moreover, it promotes a creative participation of the public in new policies, oriented towards sustainable development, and tourism—especially geotourism and ecotourism—becomes an important resource, especially in these times of crisis.

Menzel, Birgit; Hagemeister, Michael and Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer (eds). The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (review)

REVIEWS 373 The reception of these myths and representations of monarchy is an area that would benefit from greater exploration. While Wortman suggests that inherent contradictions developed in the myth of monarchy, it is important to grasp the ways in which the image of the monarch were understood and interpreted by both Russia’s elites and its people more generally are important. The ‘naive monarchism’ of the Russian peasant, to use Daniel Field’s phrase, is an important component in the perception of the monarch. The politics of the Russian empire were more than just a dialogue between monarch and elites, and the broader reception of the symbolic ideas of monarchy are significant for comprehending the development and eventual collapse of the Romanov regime. This thought-provoking collection of essays reminds us of the complexity of Russian political culture: Wortman’s work on the Russian monarchy is significant and original. School of History Peter Waldron University of East Anglia Menzel, Birgit; Hagemeister, Michael and Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer (eds). The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions. Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe, 17. Otto Sagner, Munich and Berlin, 2012. 448 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. €48.00. The twenty-one essays in The New Age of Russia are the fruitful result of an international research conference on the metaphysical roots of Soviet civilization, held in Berlin in March 2007. They examine an enormous number of esoteric phenomena, including holistic medicine, ceremonial magic, UFOs and space travel, popular occultism, mystical literature, shamanism, Eastern mysticism, theosophical doctrines and parapsychology, among others. BerniceRosenthal,oneofeditors,startedthisparticularballrollinginJune1991, when she organized a conference on Russian occultism at Fordham University. The New Age of Russia appears fifteen years after Rosenthal’s path-breaking The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, NY and London, 1997), a collection of essays by the American, European and Russian scholars who participated in the 1991 event. A comparison of the two volumes reveals how this second event evolves from the first and how the field has expanded and matured. The principal essays of The New Age of Russia are organized into three chronological sections. Each section addresses particular representations of occult thought in its time period. Not surprisingly, the essays are asymmetrical, in that some are synthetic, others analytical, while methodologies and approaches to the material vary considerably. SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 374 In the first section, which covers the pre-Revolutionary and early Soviet period, an engaging essay by Julia Mannherz introduces the contradictory nature of popular occult entertainment in the late empire. Konstantin Burmistrov’s eye-opening survey of the many occult circles and groups that existed in the 1920s and 1930s follows; his essay introduces intriguing new material from the FSB archives. Oleg Shishkin’s essay on Bolshevik occultists explores the complex topic of secret Soviet government research into the occult. Marcus Osterrieder discusses Nicholas Roerich’s ‘political occultism’ without succumbing either to politics or adulation, and Michael Hagemeister reveals the occult roots of Soviet space exploration in his discussion of Konstantin Tsiolkovskii’s theosophical interests. The second section, ostensibly covering the high Soviet period (1930–85), focuses on occultism in the Space Age. Birgit Menzel’s comparative essay surveys and locates Russian ‘occuculture’ in the context of its European and American counterparts of the period 1960–85, while Leonid Heller looks at occultism in literature and popular fiction. Matthias Schwartz explores the occult aspects of Soviet science fiction from the 1920s to Tarkovskii’s film, Stalker (1979), and Marlène Laruelle provides a lucid discussion of the cultish revival of Nikolai Fedorov’s Cosmism, a peculiarly Russian attempt to ‘synthesize Gnostic beliefs and scientific progress’ (p. 239). The essays of the third section explore the emergence of Russian esotericism from the occult underground in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods. This section is longer and necessarily less ‘shaped’ than the first two, since its time frame has yet to complete it historical run. Demyan Belyaev’s essay addresses popular and boulevard esotericism, occult self-help, fraudulent psychics and the role of the media in a disintegrating post-Soviet landscape. Mark Sedgwick discusses the neo-Eurasianist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, creator of...

Signification, Objectification, and the Mimetic Uncanny in Claude Debussy’s “Golliwog’s Cakewalk”

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED] On October 30, 1905, Emma Bardac gave birth to Claude Debussy's only child, a daughter named Claude-Emma (1905-1919), affectionately known as Chouchou. According to family friend Arthur Hartmann, Chouchou, who bore a striking resemblance to her father, was remarkably mature, and at five or six years old, she not be treated as a child (Hartmann 2003:62-63). Debussy was a doting father, and the two were inseparable companions until the composer's death in 1918 (Figure 1). He dedicated his 1908 piano suite entitled Children's Corner to her, a piece in which he explores the world as seen through a child's imaginative eyes--perhaps even Chouchou's. To be sure, the piece bears Chouchou's specific imprint, with four of the six movements named after her toys: Jimbo's Lullaby, after her stuffed elephant; Serenade for the Doll, after Chouchou's favorite doll; Little Shepherd, after a toy shepherd boy; and Golliwog's Cakewalk, after a popular minstrel doll. Yet, several elements about this suite disrupt the lighthearted musical depiction of childhood. To begin, Debussy's dedication contains the following message: A ma chere petite Chouchou, avec les tenders excuses de son pere pour ce qui va suivre (To my dear little Chouchou, with her father's tender apologies for what follows). This request for forgiveness offers an initial clue that there is more beneath the playful surface of Children's Corner than meets the ear. But what about this youthful suite, which exudes charm and tenderness, (Hinson 2007:4) could merit such an apology? The final movement, Golliwog's Cakewalk, particularly problematizes the childlike innocence portrayed in Childrens Corner. This movement has attracted much critical attention mainly for its juxtaposition of a ragtime-inflected cakewalk--a popular music and dance form that was in vogue at the turn of the twentieth century--with parodied quotations of Richard Wagner's Prelude to Tristan und Isolde. Most notably, Lawrence Kramer has suggested that the combination of these musical materials is the movement's raison d'etre, as the once-revered Wagner is put into dialogue with a lowbrow popular music idiom (Kramer 2004:113). Kramer echoes the familiar Debussy-Wagner topos, where Debussy struggles to escape the shadow of Wagner's influence, asserting that in Golliwog's Cakewalk, Debussy smilingly relativizes Wagner into insignificance, putting Tristan cheek to cheek with music doubly primitive, being both and African American (Kramer 2004:113; emphasis added). However, this interpretation of Golliwog's Cakewalk is not entirely satisfying, as Kramer neglects important and perhaps more salient features of the movement. Relegating the history and meaning of the Golliwog doll and the cultural importance of the to mere trifles (Kramer 2004:113), Kramer deals with neither title element of Golliwog's Cakewalk in any depth. But the status of Golliwog and the as popular trifles makes an examination of their historical residues and functions in Debussy's music especially compelling. The term cakewalk describes a dance form that came to characterize a specific musical genre in mid-nineteenth century United States. Dance historian and musicologist Davinia Caddy's exploration of the traces the history of the dance from its roots in African-American slavery, to popular entertainment, and finally to its arrival on French soil as a white, bourgeois leisure activity (Caddy 2007). After summarizing this trajectory, Caddy plucks the from its racial context and considers its emphasis on a particularly strange style of movement as part of contemporary French tastes for physicality. Caddy uses this term to describe both the bodily postures of the and exercise regiments of the same time period. She wishes to avoid reductive racial interpretations of the dance, as she notes that the arena of cultural identity is unavoidably complex (Caddy 2007:291). …

Reviews

GUNHILD BORGGREEN and RUNE GADE, eds., Performing Archives / Archives of Performance, reviewed by David Pellegrini PENNY FARFAN and LESLEY FERRIS, eds., Contemporary Women Playwrights into the Twenty-First Century, reviewed by Lisa M. Anderson KAREN JÜRS-MUNBY, JEROME CARROLL, and STEVE GILES, eds. Postdramatic Theatre and the Political: International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance, reviewed by Julia Jarcho CAOIMHE MCAVINCHEY, ed., Performance and Community: Commentary and Case Studies, reviewed by Claire Syler CHRISTINA S. MCMAHON, Recasting Transnationalism through Performance: Theatre Festivals in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil, reviewed by Sarah J. Townsend CHRIS MORASH and SHAUN RICHARDS, Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place, reviewed by Lisa Fitzgerald ANDREA MOST, Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America, reviewed by Harley Erdman CRAIG R. PRENTISS, Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II, reviewed by Paige A. McGinley

L’Isola dei Famosi: Minority politics in Italy via reality television

Abstract This article interrogates the potential for reality television shows to serve as outlets for the representation of social and political issues on Italian television. To this end the article offers an in-depth critical analysis of selected episodes of two editions of the popular Italian reality television show L’Isola dei Famosi/Celebrity Island, which aired on public television channel RAI 2 from 2003 to 2012. In particular, the article focuses on the 2008 season, characterized by the victory of Vladimir Luxuria, a transgender entertainer and activist of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual and Queer (LGBTQ) community in Italy; and on the 2010 season, which featured the participation of homosexual writer Aldo Busi, who was expelled from the show for his remarks against religious and political institutions. A close analysis of these two seasons reveals the ways in which popular prime time entertainment programmes such as a reality television show can generate significant public exposure for marginal identities and controversial political topics.