Cultural Reception Research Articles

Regionalizing culture: the political economy of Japanese popular culture in Asia

This ambitious work provides a comprehensive, empirically grounded study of the production, circulation, and reception of Japanese popular culture in Asia. While many studies typically employ an interactive approach that focuses on the of popular culture from an anthropological or cultural studies point of view, Regionalizing Culture emphasises that the consumption side and contextual meaning of popular culture are not the only salient factors in accounting for its proliferation. The production side and organisational aspects are also important. In addition to presenting individual case studies, the book offers a big-picture view of the dramatic changes that have taken place in popular culture production and circulation in Asia over the past two decades. The author has gleaned information from primary sources in Japanese, English, and other languages; research visits to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Seoul; as well as insights of people with firsthand knowledge from within the cultural industries. From this broad range of source, he develops an integrative political economic approach to popular culture. Regionalizing Culture offers a dialectical look at the organisation of cultural production, primarily at the structure and control of cultural industries, interconnections between companies and production networks, and relations between the business sector and the state. It traces the rise of Japan as a popular culture powerhouse and the expansion of its cultural industries into Asian markets. It looks as well at the creation of markets for Japanese cultural commodities since the late 1980s, the industrial and normative impact that Japanese cultural industries have on the structure of the local cultural industries, and the wider implications these processes have for the Asian region. The growing popularity and importance of Japan's popular culture will make this book a basic text for scholars and students of popular culture as well as for those interested in political economy, media and communication studies, Japanese-Asian relations, Asian studies, and international relations.

“O brave new world”: Contemporary Reception of Shakespeare and Popular Culture

“O brave new world”: Contemporary Reception of Shakespeare and Popular Culture

THE HEROIC AND THE BANAL: CONSUMING SOVIET MOVIES IN PRE-SOCIALIST CHINA, 1920S–1940S

Soviet cinema as part of the socialist cultural landscape in Maoist China has been well recognized and extensively researched. This article looks at the earlier exhibition history of Soviet movies in pre-socialist China (from the 1920s to 1940s). It demonstrates that the early Chinese consumption and reception of this film culture involved two intertwined attitudes. On the one hand, Soviet movies were greeted as a much-needed Hero in the Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist discourses. On the other hand, the exhibition of Soviet movies operated commercially, and commercial sectors promoted the popular appeal of these movies to fulfill the carnal desire of spectators. By examining film reviews, advertisements, and censorship reports, this article explores the ways in which the Hero image and the banal side of the Hero were constructed in the pre-socialist milieu of China.

Robots and Architecture: Experiments, Fiction, Epistemology

AbstractHow ready are we to receive robots on our building sites? Antoine Picon, G Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), highlights the mixed cultural reception that robotics in architecture has received, veering from techno‐utopianism to techno‐pessimism. Is the greatest value in robotics for architecture in fact contained within the discipline, residing in the way that it forces architects to think differently, shifting their mental landscape and making them design truly three‐dimensional space? Are we, though, in danger of neglecting to explore and re‐imagine the fundamental relationships between men, designers and workers, and machines, computers and robots?

Media and the Imaginary in History

This paper discusses how media theory and history should approach specimens of evidence about the cultural reception of media pertaining to the realms of the fantastic, such as speculations, predictions, dreams, and other forms of fantasy regarding media. It argues that the role of the imaginary in the history of media can be fully comprehended only by employing a perspective which is dynamic in time. In different phases of a medium's evolution, in fact, we find different fantasies; it follows that we need specific approaches to study them. The article discusses fantasies which are specific to three stages in media change: those preceding the actual invention of a medium; those accompanying the earliest period after the introduction of a new medium; and those connected to old media.

Rewarding the production of culture: Le Prix Goncourt

Universally celebrated as the most prestigious French literary award since its inception in 1903, le Prix Goncourt plays a remarkably influential role in French literature. Linked to complex issues of the commercialization of art, the economic power of publishing houses, and the ambivalent relationship of the reading public to the critical press, the Goncourt represents a controversial phenomenon nervously anticipated every fall. Analysis of the cultural impact and critical reception of three novels recognized by the prize—Jean Rouaud's Les Champs d’honneur, Jean Echenoz's Je m’en vais, and Michel Houellebecq's La Carte et le territoire—reveals a multifaceted cultural network, embodying a fascinating mirror of the French cultural landscape itself. In 1990, the press applauded the first novel of a then-unknown Rouaud, whose book appeared with Minuit (significant because not with Gallimard, Grasset, or Seuil, the conglomerate known as “Galligrasseuil”); his exploration of the motifs of familial and national history resounded throughout France. In 1999, Echenoz's ludic conception of reality as a trompe-l’œil as duplicitous as fiction creates a hybrid text, part roman d’aventures, part polar. Finally, in 2010 Houellebecq offers a sarcastic art-world satire, is accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia, and hands to Flammarion its first Goncourt in two decades.

Collective individualities: cultural and political reception in Taiwan's history, architecture and cities

Reception is an idea which deals with the reinterpretation of knowledge. Reception therefore appears as an important issue in studies of historiography that see textual forms of history as representations of the past. Reception in history varies from agent to agent: different subjects who hold different ideological positions, in different positions with respect to power relations, receive the same object differently. Public reception, for instance, plays an important role in shaping the spatial representations of architecture and cities, which can be regarded as textual forms of history and therefore as a form of historiography which reinterprets and integrates the facts of the past. The work of Ackbar Abbas, in his depiction of the skyscrapers in Hong Kong which inscribe capitalism in the fabric of that city, offers a remarkable example. He illustrates how Hong Kong's spatial routine plays out in the reception of styles; for example, design oriented towards economy, the phenomenon of constant building and rebuilding, and the pursuit of hyper-density in Hong Kong's built environment. In different time periods, locations and cultural-political contexts, therefore, the public reception of architecture and cities differs. This paper takes Taiwan as an example. It examines a transformational period – from Taiwan's post-Second World War development to the present – scrutinising the reception of its history, architecture and cities.

“The Little Dog Is Only a Stage Property”: The Blind Man’s Dog in Victorian Culture

“The Little Dog Is Only a Stage Property”:The Blind Man’s Dog in Victorian Culture Jennifer Esmail (bio) In an 1860 article on “blind mendicancy,” an Athenaeum writer caustically reports that despite the common sight of a blind “beggar” “whin[ing] at one end of a string that terminates in a dog,” blind Londoners typically traversed the city with only a staff. “The little dog,” declares the writer, “is only a stage property” (Gilbert 407). This report is a salient example of a dominant strand of Victorian discourse around blindness, one that persistently, and disparagingly, aligns blindness with begging on the street. Further, both the writer’s description of the dog’s economic utility (as a kind of “stage property” in the begging performance) and the inversion of an expected species hierarchy (it is the man and not the dog “whining at one end of the string”) are typical of Victorian accounts of the figure of the “blind man’s dog.”1 An examination of the Victorian cultural reception of the blind man’s [End Page 18] dog reveals, first, that blind people and their dogs forged multiple kinds of partnerships in the Victorian period that moved beyond guiding assistance to a range of economic and affective interactions. Furthermore, Victorian representations of these collaborations consistently mobilized hierarchies of cultural worth—whether related to class, ability, or species—in order to represent the blind man’s dog’s qualities of intelligence, industriousness, and fidelity as a model not only for other non-human animals but also for humans. While all Victorians relied heavily upon non-human animals for work, clothing, transportation, food, or companionship, an attention to the Victorian cultural reception of the blind man’s dog, in particular, reveals that Victorian writers often understood the partnership between a human and a non-human animal differently—as a solution for a form of “lack” or even as an index of dependence—when the human requiring animal assistance had been marked as disabled. Ivan Kreilkamp’s conception of “anthroprosthesis” is a useful lens through which to investigate this particular understanding of animals as prosthetics for people with disabilities: according to Kreilkamp, Victorians used animals as “anthroprosthetic” tools that both “extend[ed] the human and mark[ed] the human being’s difference from the animal by incorporating and appropriating the animal in an ongoing, anxious process of defining that difference” (36–37, emphasis added). In Victorian accounts of the blind man’s dog, the dog is consistently described as extending his or her human companion’s abilities. However, the “ongoing, anxious process of defining th[e] difference” between the sighted dog and the blind human is either marked in a manner that inverts the dominant human/non-human animal hierarchy or left altogether ambiguous. Attending to the unique position of the blind man’s dog, then, underscores how the process of demarcating and hierarchizing human and non-human animals can be confounded when the non-human animal of the partnership is culturally revered and the disabled human partner is culturally denigrated. These constructions of the blind man and his dog expose how distinctions between human and non-human animals so often hinge on cultural understandings of ability.2 The blind man’s dog is an especially rich cultural construct for an investigation of the uneasy connections and convergences between disability and animality because of what has been labelled the Victorian “cult” of the dog (Donald 138). Dogs were celebrated above all other non-human animals in Victorian culture for features believed to be especially canine—namely, faithfulness, sagacity, and self-sacrifice.3 Furthermore, Victorian descriptions of the blind man’s dog amplify conventional glorifications of canine qualities, whether of the dog’s fidelity to his or her owner even through dire poverty, of the dog’s cleverness and industriousness in navigating the streets, or of the dog’s unselfishness in saving his or her companion’s life. For example, Francis Trevelyan Buckland, a naturalist who published various accounts of “Puss, the blind man’s dog” in the 1870s, describes the many ways that Puss’s [End Page 19] “intelligent” and “faithful” efforts saved the life of her blind companion, James Stocks...

Noah im kalten Krieg: Igor Strawinsky’s Musical Play “The Flood.” by Hannah Dübgen (review)

Reviewed by: Noah im kalten Krieg: Igor Strawinsky’s Musical Play “The Flood.” by Hannah Dübgen Emily Richmond Pollock Noah im kalten Krieg: Igor Straw insky’s Musical Play “The Flood.” By Hannah Dübgen. (Musiksoziologie, no. 17.) Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2012. [131 p. ISBN 9783761822654. €29.95.] Music examples, facsimiles, bibliography. Noah im kalten Krieg presents a variety of interpretations and insights regarding a single work: Igor Stravinsky’s The Flood, composed for a CBS television broadcast in 1962. Each of Hannah Dübgen’s eight chapters approaches the piece from a different angle, marshaling evidence from source material, music analysis, secondary sources, and published statements by Stravinsky (with Robert Craft), to sketch a series of narratives about how the work might be understood. The introduction poses the question, “Why did Stravinsky compose a work of music theater on the subject of the story of Noah’s Ark at the beginning of the 1960’s in America?” (p. 13). Dübgen’s title gives a clue to her answer: the Cold War is the overarching interpretive reference point, specifically referring to the connection between the biblical cataclysm presented in The Flood and the fear of the atomic bomb (as she quotes Stravinsky, “The Flood is also The Bomb” [p. 12]). Dübgen argues that the story ought to best be considered allegorically, and that the allegory in question is no mere moral abstraction, but is really a kind of contemporary analogy. The best moments of the book are those that tie back to this allegory by integrating a discussion of modern musical techniques with questions of theology and dramatic tradition. It is intriguing that, given the political charge of her interpretive framework, the Bärenreiter series in which this monograph appears is focused on “music sociology,” and Dübgen quotes as her epigraph Charles M. Joseph’s epilogue to Stravinsky Inside Out, which calls attention to “a more expansive, more humanistic context” (Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], 269). While Joseph’s own chapter on The Flood is filled with interesting contextual details, personal reflections, and insights from correspondence, readers seeking a similar focus in Dübgen’s book—e.g., thick history, cultural reception, a study of the influence of larger social and artistic systems on the work—will find such topics confined to the last twelve pages of the volume. This is perhaps disappointing, as the bomb allegory she favors is so particular in its political and cultural resonances, which could have been more comprehensively explored. It was interesting, however, to read her analysis of the fraught and even ironic dynamic between television (as mass media) and the marketing of The Flood as a major cultural event involving persons of aesthetic importance (pp. 103–6). After a synopsis of The Flood and a summary of basic information, Dübgen sketches out several different possible paths, many of which have the potential to lead to other fruitful work on the piece. Integrating music analysis into hermeneutics is a challenging task, and Dübgen executes it with confidence and flair. Dübgen’s discussion of the piece’s opening passages demonstrates her analytical method, which connects musical features (in this case, the structure of the opening “chaos” chord) to the “semantics” or significance created by those musical features (pp. 35–42). One particularly concentrated chapter, with [End Page 429] similarly astute attention to both musical content and dramatic significance, discusses the “antipodes” of God and Lucifer both musically and theologically, connecting their exaggerated characterizations to the difficulty of “sacralizing” a modern drama that has secular, contemporary resonances (pp. 64–70). Also illuminating is her discussion of the music of The Flood in light of other Stravinsky works that are “ritualized” (Les noces) or that have elements of “religious narrative” (The Rake’s Progress), which raises interesting problems about the connection between profane dramatic genres and religious content (pp. 71–83). The second half of the same chapter, however, is a flyover discussion of so many other works (the Mass, the Canticum Sacrum, the Symphony of Psalms, the Requiem Canticles, and Threni) that it becomes difficult to perceive as an integrated argument. Dübgen organizes...

The Heroic and the Banal: Consuming Soviet Movies in Pre-Socialist China, 1920s–1940s

Soviet cinema as part of the socialist cultural landscape in Maoist China has been well recognized and extensively researched. This article looks at the earlier exhibition history of Soviet movies in pre-socialist China (from the 1920s to 1940s). It demonstrates that the early Chinese consumption and reception of this film culture involved two intertwined attitudes. On the one hand, Soviet movies were greeted as a much-needed Hero in the Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist discourses. On the other hand, the exhibition of Soviet movies operated commercially, and commercial sectors promoted the popular appeal of these movies to fulfill the carnal desire of spectators. By examining film reviews, advertisements, and censorship reports, this article explores the ways in which the Hero image and the banal side of the Hero were constructed in the pre-socialist milieu of China.

ПОЛОНІСТИКА В УКРАЇНІ ТА УКРАЇНІСТИКА В ПОЛЬЩІ: ДІАЛОГ КУЛЬТУР

The article deals with the Ukrainian-Polish scientific relations of the late 20th century – the beginning of the 21st century in the scientific achievements of the M. Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The deep analysis of the modern folklore and art studies in Polish studies has been conducted. Significant attention has been paid to the reception of the Polish culture in Ukraine and the Ukrainian culture in Poland.

Chaucer’s Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture by Kathleen Forni (review)

Reviewed by: Chaucer’s Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture by Kathleen Forni Helen Young Forni, Kathleen, Chaucer’s Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2013; paperback; pp. 176; R.R.P. US$40.00; ISBN 9780786473441. Kathleen Forni’s book examines the Anglophone popular culture reception of Geoffrey Chaucer in the past two decades or so, consciously building on earlier work by Candace Barrington and Steve Ellis. Chaucer has been a mainstay of Middle English studies since the very early days of the academy – [End Page 207] and of English poetry for much longer – and his reputation, and the reception of his works in later centuries has been the topic of considerable interest in recent decades. At less than 170 pages, it is a slim volume, but nonetheless makes a solid contribution to the field. In her Introduction, Forni contests the categories of professional (academic) and popular, ‘positing a continuation rather than a chasm’ between them (p. 11). She takes a cultural studies approach to assert the significance of Chaucer’s popular reception in an argument that largely parallels those made to justify the study of popular medievalisms much more broadly. That it does not reference the ongoing discussions around medievalism is one of the more striking gaps in this Introduction, one which leads it substantially to re-cover already trodden ground. Making connections to that scholarship would also have contextualised the argument and discussion of Chaucer within the much broader context of contemporary popular receptions of the Middle Ages. The first chapter is the most substantial in terms of both length and analytical depth. It offers an overview of much of the material the book covers, structured by four different modes of intertextuality: adaptation, appropriation, invocation, and citation. This framework provides a vocabulary for talking about how meaning is made by different kinds of reference to Chaucer and his work. The approach allows Forni to demonstrate a veritable ‘proliferation of meaning’ (p. 59). Genre and medium variously shape what Chaucerian intertexuality signifies; neither the icon nor his works have a fixed meaning across the diversity of popular culture. The comparative framework, however, also allows Forni to identify pilgrimage and satire as two common motifs. She also finds more coherence between the framing story of pilgrimage and embedded tales in modern works than in The Canterbury Tales, with the framing story acting as ‘an inclusive discursive platform, allowing a diversity of voices’ (p. 59). The remaining four chapters consist of case studies of texts and genres, engaging in greater depth with some of the works initially discussed in the first. Chapter 2, ‘Chaucer the Detective’, focuses on historical murder mysteries which either take place during the pilgrimage to Canterbury, presenting it as an historical event and the pilgrims as suspects – and at times victims – and a second set which delve into the gaps in Chaucer’s known biography to see him play detective. Chaucer, in such works, becomes an agent of social order, and although he at times acts on behalf of the powerless he is also often unable to act against the corrupt. The third chapter, ‘Chaucer on the TV Screen’, explores two of the most well-known recent adaptations of The Canterbury Tales: the BBC’s modernised Canterbury Tales (2003), and Jonathon Myerson’s animated Canterbury Tales (1998–2000). Forni argues that both have a certain fidelity or respect for their source material, while also exploring the many changes wrought by the new media and the new cultural context. [End Page 208] Chapter 4, ‘The Canterbury Pilgrimage and African Diaspora’, presents material that, though likely to be unfamiliar to Australian and New Zealand readers, attests more than any other to the diversity of Chaucer’s popular afterlives. The works it considers, moreover, are closer to the literary or high-culture end of the spectrum than either the mystery novels of the first chapter, or the television series of the second. ‘Cultural, social – and especially female – exclusion and oppression’ are recurrent themes (p. 121). ‘Chaucer the Brand’ is the short final chapter (the book has no Conclusion). It considers Chaucer and his name as cultural commodities. Forni shows that Chaucer-as-brand has consistent meanings...

Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments. Edited by Joanne Parker

Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments. Edited by Joanne Parker

Brassens en España: un ejemplo de transferencia cultural

This article analyzes song translation from a cultural point of view, applying polysystem and cultural transfer theories, using as a case study the ways in which the work and style of French singersongwriter Georges Brassens has been exported-imported in Spain. In the first section, the translation of songsis described as a form of cultural transfer, with a fixed skopos within a specific context. Then, different forms of transfers are reviewed: cultural reception, stylistic appropriation/emulation and translation/adaptation. The second section analyses why and how the «quintessentially French» singer-songwriter Brassens has been so successfully integrated in the Spanish cultural reservoir, mainly through the role played in this transfer by artists such as Paco Ibáñez, Javier Krahe and Loquillo. Finally, the different strategies which lie behind musical transfers are explored alongside their role in the target culture

Architectures of pirate film cultures: encounters with Korean Wave in “Northeast” India

This essay examines the multiple force fields within which South Korean films and teleserials circulate in Northeastern India.1 It looks at the complex imbrications of infrastructure, the political tensions between the region and the nation, pirate modes of cultural reproduction, dissemination, and reception to re-negotiate the larger terrains of identity, national culture, and modernity. The argument is built-up through an analysis of the socio-political world of film viewers, engagement with film theory, theories on globalization, and writings on cultural travel and access in non-Western contexts. It examines the forms of “localization” and appropriation of South Korean popular culture by emphasizing the materiality of media, the role of diverse socio-political agents, digital technology, and the dense networks of circulation. While refraining from textual analysis, the study draws attention to how the imageries of modern life offered by films and teleserials are accessed in “debased” and dubbed forms that often distort authorial intent. Such modes of engagement engendered by piracy and non-legal media distribution and reception introduces certain “aesthetics” that have a bearing on the consumption of media. Thus the narrative of access—in fits and starts—to a world of consumerism exemplified by the Korean Wave is also a narrative of the various modernities that exist within Asia.

Promoting Affect and Desire in the International Industrial World of Smooth Jazz: The Case of Candy Dulfer

In this article, I suggest that the feminized and sexualized associations of smooth jazz as fashioned by the industry during the 1990s have since contributed to its vitriolic and sometimes hysterical denouncement by jazz performers and scholars. In particular, I uncover the affective, sexual, and gendered significance surrounding smooth jazz's reception to highlight the industrial complex precipitating its commercial ascent. Finally, I concretely interrogate these values by highlighting the work of Dutch saxophonist Candy Dulfer, emphasizing the industrial dimensions undergirding her reception as a highly successful 1990s instrumentalist whose work was often promoted as smooth jazz, despite the stylistic diversity of her recordings. Here I contrast industry discourse to those performative values expressed by Dulfer, while also recognizing the larger historical and cultural reception of jazz as a highly gendered, racialized, and sexualized cultural phenomenon. Ultimately I show how Dulfer both participated in and disrupted the feminized and sexualized associations of smooth jazz to artfully side-step the bonds of anxiety over legitimacy that might otherwise have confined her in an increasingly fragmented and international jazz world. By uncovering the semiotic significance attached to smooth jazz's promotion and reception, my analysis indirectly critiques dominant scholarly debates, which cumulatively and exclusively emphasize race and ethnicity (over gender or sexuality) as essential constructs influencing jazz's broader cultural significance. These biases have led to under-developed conceptualizations of jazz's complex professionalization during the late-twentieth century.

Exporting perilous Pauline: Pearl White and serial film craze

Exceptionally popular during their time, the spectacular American action film serials of the 1910s featured exciting stunts, film tricks, and effects set against the background of modern technology, often starring resourceful female heroines who displayed traditionally male qualities such as endurance, strength, and authority. The most renowned of these queens was Pearl White, whose career as the adventurous character Pauline developed during a transitional phase in the medium's evolving production strategies, distribution and advertising patterns, and fan culture. In this volume, an international group of scholars explores how American serials starring Pearl White and other female stars affected the emerging cinemas in the United States and abroad. Contributors investigate the serial genre and its narrative patterns, marketing, cultural reception, and historiographic importance, with essays on Pearl White's life on and off the screen as well as the queen genre in Western and Eastern Europe, India, and China.Contributors are Weihong Bao, Rudmer Canjels, Marina Dahlquist, Monica Dall'Asta, Kevin B. Johnson, Christina Petersen, and Rosie Thomas.

In pursuit of pop culture: Reception of pop culture in the People’s Republic of Poland as opposition to the political system – Example of the science fiction fandom

Researching the fans of pop culture texts, it is worth considering a direction that has been neglected in fan studies: the treatment of fan practices as opposition to the polity of a country. Such considerations are particularly crucial in the context of fan communities functioning in non-democratic countries. The author describes the conditions of reception of pop culture texts in Poland under communism. It was in this era that access to such transmissions was restricted, and since fans sought to get access to those rationed cultural assets, their reception ought to be viewed as a symbolic opposition to the politics of the country. The article illustrates this using the example of science fiction fans functioning in the 1980s. The mechanism that governs their community is discussed as exemplified by issues of the literary magazine Fantastyka between 1982 and 1989. The fans’ opposition to the political system has been presented as an escape from the everyday difficulties connected with functioning in a communist polity. The fans facing the conditions of the time strived to get their favourite texts and overcame some institutional obstacles connected with organising their activities.

<i>The Criterion</i> y la cultura española: génesis de una relación. T. S. Eliot, Antonio Marichalar, John B. Trend y la <i>Revista de Occidente</i>

One of the cornerstones of the British literary review The Criterion , founded in 1922 by poet and editor T.S. Eliot that lasted until 1939 was its strong universal spirit, which led to the inclusion of texts and reports on the culture of other countries in its pages. The presence of Spain was notable, thanks mainly to the chronicles sent from Madrid by Antonio Marichalar, the contributions of English musicologist and hispanist John Brande Trend, and the reviews of the Revista de Occidente . The aim of this work is not to study the content of these contributions, but to explore and clarify the beginnings of the relationship between Eliot and those who facilitated the reception of the Spanish culture in his review. To this end, the extensive correspondence of the English-speaking poet has proved an invaluable and the main source for this study.

La recepción de la cultura italiana en La Ilustración Española y Americana

This study analyzes the various references to Italy in several sections of La Ilustración Española y Americana in order to assess the contribution of the magazine in the configuration of the reception of Italian culture in Spain in the late nineteenth century, through the newspaper and through network of textual features associated therewith.