3 results
8 - Feminism and popular culture
- from Part 2 - In feminism’s wake: genre, period, form
- Edited by Ellen Rooney, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory
- Published online:
- 28 November 2006
- Print publication:
- 06 July 2006, pp 172-192
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Summary
The study of popular culture addresses both media texts and cultural practices. This ever-expanding area of scholarship includes film, science fiction, television, romance novels, popular music, magazines: all the seeming ephemera in the public domain that through its popularity remains in production and circulation or has attained a place in cultural memory. As a field that encompasses and interrogates the production, distribution, and interpretation of all popular media forms, this much-maligned discipline demands particularly stringent intellectual and methodological rigor. Feminist interventions in the field have been both inspiring and infuriating. For example, Germaine Greer's three and sixpence purchase of the two romance novels analyzed in The Female Eunuch does not actually misrepresent the genre, but her anecdotal discussion of their impact falls short of the systematic methodology expected in scholarly research in popular culture.
Difficulties in studying popular culture arise from the scale of the mass media, its ephemeral nature, and the paradox of its apparent inconsequence. Feminist analysis of popular culture intensifies the debate over whether popular texts merely reflect society or act as part of the process of mediation in social life. The understanding that popular and mass media texts act as sites of cultural practice, which Greer acknowledges in her discussion, links popular culture directly to ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world. The status of these texts as shared cultural reference points that make visible ideologies, discourses, and values is a major topic of feminist analysis. Popular culture constitutes a space of exchange between dominant and subordinate cultures and provides a valuable area of study for those who hope to understand social change.
13 - Crime in film and on TV
- Edited by Martin Priestman, University of Surrey
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 06 November 2003, pp 227-244
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Summary
One of the decisive steps in developing narrative cinema took place through the realisation of a dramatic crime on screen. Edwin S. Porter's commercial success with The Great Train Robbery (1903) rests on his understanding of a variety of different genres whilst bending and extending their conventions in order to produce something new and exciting. Moreover, this was a narrative experience which was very much in keeping with the headlines of the day. His film is often thought of as the beginning of the Western genre, but it is the crime that provides the narrative impetus. This chapter will look at films and television programmes which foreground crime and detection relying on mystery and adventure archetypes, but it acknowledges that during the twentieth century crime features in practically all commercial genres. Therefore, the choice of films and television programmes focuses on transitions in the representation of crime and detection on screen as a means to understand the determinants of these changes.
Aphasia and Mother Tongue: Themes of Language Creation and Silence in Women's Science Fiction
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- By Nickianne Moody, Liverpool John Moores University
- Edited by Andy Sawyer, David Seed
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- Book:
- Speaking Science Fiction
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2000, pp 179-187
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Summary
This consideration of the uses of silence and language creation in women's science fiction is drawn from a much larger study which examined popular fiction, marketed as science fiction in Britain, during the 1980s. At the beginning of the 1980s, quite a drastic change occurred in the look, content and form of print science fiction in Britain. Partly this was due to deeper structural changes in the British publishing industry and book production, especially in the context of multi-national and multi-media leisure corporations. It was also due to the way that the publishing industry began to perceive science fiction as a commercial genre. To generalize, this change resulted in the term ‘science fiction’, as a category for selling popular fiction, losing its prominence in the bookshop. It was replaced initially by fantasy and increasingly by horror and these generic distinctions adopted a new iconography for their titles and cover designs.
Defining science fiction is a quagmire, especially when considering how it was redefined by publishers, writers, booksellers and readers during the 1980s. The definition used by this study was therefore Norman Spinrad's infamous statement that science fiction is whatever is sold as science fiction. The study's main focus became two groups of writers, one predominantly male and the other a group of women writers who continued to write and had their writing signified as science fiction. They wrote fiction which addressed and explored contemporary science and scientific practice, new technology and social change. Both groups, that is cyberpunk and feminist science fiction, were recognized by critics and readers from outside a specialist interest in the genre. Both prospective futures featured imminent and far-reaching social change. Cyberpunk proposes an urban high-tech dark future medievalism, which was not denied by the feminist fiction. However, in contrast women writers offered the possibility of a collective pastoral guild-ordered life in the fictional future which may nor may not utilize new technology.
In order to consider the representation of silence in this fiction we are going to look at a smaller group of the feminist science fiction writers. It is a pleasing peculiarity of the genre that feminist writers could appropriate science fiction forms, conventions and marketing for their critique of contemporary society and social relations.