Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives

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Rowman & Littlefield, 2008 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 315 pages
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What is pop culture? Why do we so often hate to love it and love to hate it? What makes us embrace parts of it and not others? Marcel Danesi explores our human desire for meaning and the need to symbolize it in music, language, art, and other creative forms. He offers a variety of perspectives to help us understand the products of popular culture_from music and websites to fads, celebrities, and more_tapping into the fun of pop culture without making us feel guilty for enjoying it.
 

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Contents

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Page 108 - By hearing him often, I came to distinguish easily between sermons newly compos'd, and those which he had often preach'd in the course of his travels. His delivery of the latter...
Page 82 - Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.
Page 108 - His delivery of the latter was so improved by frequent repetitions that every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of * voice was so perfectly well turned and well placed that, without being interested In the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse, a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music.
Page 65 - Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.
Page 133 - The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperilling the whole state, since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
Page 215 - If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator — the commodity form.
Page 82 - MOST Excellent and Approved Dentifrices to scour and cleanse the Teeth, making them white as Ivory, preserves from the Toothach ; so that, being constantly used, the parties using it are never troubled with the Toothach : It fastens the Teeth, sweetens the Breath, and preserves the Gums and Mouth from Cankers and Imposthumes. Made by Robert Turner, Gentleman ; and the right are onely to be had at Thomas Rookes, Stationer, at the Holy Lamb at the east end of St.
Page 241 - Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Page 126 - n' roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation, all summed up nowhere so well as on Top 40 radio, that ultimate rock 'n

About the author (2008)

Marcel Danesi is professor of anthropology, semiotics, and communication theory at the University of Toronto. His books include My Son Is an Alien: A Cultural Portrait of Today's Youth and Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence, and he is the editor-in-chief of Semiotica.

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