Propaganda Of Individualism And Alienation In Modern Mass Culture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry V. Losev
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Modern Mass

Moderne Ikonen

2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-143
Author(s):  
Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent Discussion ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Modern Mass

›Ikonen‹ sind heute nicht mehr nur die Ikonen der christlichen Kirche, sondern vor allem die Ikonen der modernen Massenkultur. Beide Arten von Ikonen werden in der neueren Kunstreflexion aufgegriffen: Kunst gilt entweder, verstanden als Erbin der religiösen Ikone, als Phänomen, das Absolutes in singulärer Weise anschaulich er- fahrbar macht. Oder aber die Kunst gilt umgekehrt lediglich als Klasse in der Welt der säkularen Ikonen. Demgegenüber wird im Beitrag erstens die These vertretenwerden, daß die neuere Kunst sowohl Aspekte transzendenter als auch immanenter Ikonen umfaßt. Zugleich ist es aber, so die zweite These, für unser Kunstverständnis charakteristisch, ein theoretisches Kontrastverhältnis zwischen Kunst und Ikone an- zunehmen. Dieses gründet auf einer spezifischen Reflexivität der Kunst, durch die sie sich von der Ikone beiderlei Art kategorial unterscheidet. Today, the word ›icon‹ usually no longer refers to the icons of the Christian church, but to the icons of the modern mass-culture. Both sorts of icons play a key-role in the recent discussion about art: Either art is supposed to be a descendant of the religious icon, a phenomenon that gives us a singular visual experience of the Absolute. On the other hand, art is supposed to be just one class among others in the wide world of the secular icons. In contrast to these two positions this essay contends that modern art comprehends aspects of transcendent as well as of immanent icons. Furthermore, it argues that at the same time it is characteristic for our notion of art to suppose a contrast between art and icon. This contrast is based on a specific reflectivity of art, which marks a categorical difference between art and both sorts of icons.

scholarly journals Влияние масс-медиа на сознание человека в пьесах Александра Марданя

2018 ◽  
pp. 153-164
Author(s):  
Maria Sibirnaya
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
The Mass Media ◽  
Music Information ◽  
Modern Mass

Nowadays the influence comprehension of the mass media as one of the most significant factors affecting contemporary culture, acquires the special significance. All kinds of new information receiving by media channels obtain the stereotyped, frequently repeatedly cultural and axiological orientations, which become fixed in people's consciousness. Skillful manipulation of information makes the power of suggestion from mass media practically unlimited. Therefore, the public opinion is created by the mass media. Being so closely intertwined with the mass media, the modern mass culture is coming through all elements of people's lives. Moreover, it appears in the literary works, which reflect the influence of the mass media on the consciousness, mentality, point of view and decisions of the literature characters, using their set example in the literature. Odessian playwright Aleksander Mardan presents his characters in the context of the events, which entails new circumstances both due to the characters decisions and out of more extensive economic and political changes. One may notice the presence of mass media in the form of music, information broadcasts and press almost in all Mardan's play. One may track out the influence on the character’s consciousness and reveal the difference between the official version and what happened in the real life. Using the performance tool, there is the action in the play showing the influence of the stereotypes implicated by the mass media. The performance reveals not only the stereotypes affection influencing the mentality of the characters, but also the viewers whose interpretation of the play’s direction is not always critical enough. Therefore, the question about the relationship between the society and mass media, about the level of freedom in mass media from the society and concerning the influence exerted by mass media on the modern culture and the human's consciousness is repeatedly presented in Alexander Mardаn’s plays.

scholarly journals Sinking in Quicksand: The Demise of Victorian High Culture in America 1870-1915

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitra Sharafi
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Ethnic Origin ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Level Of Education ◽  
Modern Mass ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Ideal

Today, the term Victorian implies snobbishness and rigidity. Our world, the result in part of a rebellion against Victorian formality and social hierarchy, celebrates the classless, the democratic, and the popular. It professes faith in the artistic judgment of all members of society regardless of ethnic origin, level of education or wealth. From the Victorian point of view, however, twentieth-century mass culture is accessible to all by appealing to the lowest common denominator; it is inclusive at the cost of a loss of education, refinement, and profundity. Turn-of-the-century America is the ideal subject for a study of the interaction between Victorian high culture and modern mass culture; the period from 1870 to 1915 was one of drastic cultural metamorphosis. Social change threatened the foundations of high culture and eventually killed it, but not without the unintentional help of the Victorians' own self-alienating behaviour.

scholarly journals Aesthetics of Tho­mas Newman’s Music to “Six Feet Under” TV Series

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-277
Author(s):  
Alexander V. Tavrizyan
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
The Us ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Postmodern Art ◽  
Artistic Images ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Modern Mass

This article analyzes the aesthetics of modern Western audiovisual art by the example of the opening titles of “Six Feet Under” TV series (2001—2005). This titles sequence, as well as the series itself, were proclaimed as “cult art” and became widely influential in the US television culture. The visuals of the sequence had been created by a team of Digital Kitchen designers on the basis of music by Thomas Newman, who was a trend setter of the soundtrack genre in the 1990s—2010s. This work is of interest, being one of the most significant in modern mass culture, which allows to analyze the aesthetic trends within the postmodern audiovisual art in general. The research is based on R. Barthes’ method of analyzing objects of mass culture, in which the literal meaning of artistic ima­ges and the symbolic one (connotations, metaphors, allegories) are considered separately. T. Newman’s music is ana­lysed by using M. Chion’s view upon soundtrack as both musical work and acoustical image. The article analyzes the coherence between the music, the frame (literal) content of the video, and the connotative (symbolic) meaning of the visual images. The concept of “affect”, taken by the historians-poststructuralists G. Deleuze and F. Guattari from the aesthetic theory of Baroque art, is used to describe similar phenomena in postmodern art. Interviews, additional materials and other sour­ces that tell about the idea of the series’ creators and about its workflow expanded the source base of the study. The audiovisual composition’s analysis revealed the aesthetic techniques of artistic images’ affective (feelings-emotional) transmission, “counterpoint” of allegorical and realistic (naturalistic) images in the visuals and the music, central role of the pairs of images-antithesis (warmth/coldness, movement/static, life/death, and some others). The author concludes that the studied aesthetic model is similar, both in its content and in the form of expression, to the Baroque aesthetics in a modified postmodern form (Neo-Baroque).

scholarly journals ANTHROPOLOGY PROLETARIAN PHYSICALITY: THE IDEOLOGICAL STRATEGY OF CONSUMPTION OF SUFFERING AND DEATH IN THE CULTURAL TRADITIONS OF THE AMERICAN HORROR FILM

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-78
Author(s):  
Sergey A. Malenko ◽  
◽  
Andrey G. Nekita ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Production Type ◽  
American Horror Film ◽  
Modern Mass

Purpose. The article analyzes the strategy of sublimation of the corporeality of bourgeois pro-duction into the artistic tradition of the American horror film as a specific, visual mythology and psy-chosomatic consumer ideology of modern mass culture. Theoretical basis. The key methodology is the principle of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, psychoanalytic research, developed and tested by the team of authors in a number of scientific papers. The applied scientific and practical approach made it possible to carry out an original, complex, com-parative analysis of symbolic interpretations of the tradition of American horror films in various spheres of socio-cultural practice. Carried out interdisciplinary study of the phenomenology of horror, makes it possible to isolate ideologically significant images sublimated in more than a century of the tradition of American horror films. Originality. The anthropological mechanism of sublimation of the proletarian physicality formed in a bosom of classical capitalist production is opened. Its essence is the unconscious attitude to the perception of bodily suffering and death as inevitable and “natural” companions of the worker's production image and guarantee of its demand in the labor market. At the same time, intensive tech-nologization of production is accompanied by a sharp inflation in the value of physical labor. At the same time, the persisting attitude to bodily suffering requires the appearance of its new forms, displac-ing the “physical” into the “visual”. It was the American horror movies most adequately perform the social order of government and business, subliming bodily suffering in the most profitable art forms. This is how the figurative and symbolic mythology of horror films is constructed, which commercial-izes the artificially formed psychosomatic dependence of the layman on the consumption of bodily suffering and death. The active popularization of horror mythology visualizes the ideology of the “American way of life”, lobbies the practice of ousting competing cultural genres and traditions, and lays the foundations of westernized post – industrial civilization – post-human, post-teles and digital world. Conclusions. Under the conditions of widespread degradation of the production type of civiliza-tion, the technology of sublimation of active attitude to the world into visual forms of its consumer destruction was formed, the driving forces of which (collective in form and individual in ways of expe-rience) were American horror films. They most adequately represent a new artistic and anthropological reality, the contours of which are so clearly drawn by the human body, the exhausted profile of power and production standards.

scholarly journals Communicative Strategies of an Interviewer Yury Dud: A Linguist’s View of the Media Phenomenon in Mass Culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 263-277
Author(s):  
O. S. Issers
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Communicative Behavior ◽  
Mass Audience ◽  
Social Communications ◽  
Communicative Strategies ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Show Business ◽  
The Media ◽  
Modern Mass

Purpose. The article examines the methods of building dialogue in interviews conducted by the popular video blogger and journalist Yury Dud, who is named the main hero of Russian cultural life in 2020 by Forbes Life. To determine his individual style, the author analyzes strategies of communicative behavior. The following parameters are the most significant for the description of interviewing strategies: thematic repertoire and thematic dominants of the conversation; methods of requesting/extracting information; methods of interpreting and evaluating what the interlocutor said; the choice of language code. The empirical basis of the study contains interviews by Yu. Dud with various interlocutors – journalists, TV presenters, cultural and show business figures, politicians, and other public figures, uploaded on the YouTube video hosting service in the period of 2017–2020. The analysis of more than 40 programs allows observing a wide range of techniques of a journalist, depending on the “addressee factor”.Results. The key topics that are regularly discussed in interviews are identified, including those that violate ethical taboos (about sex, bad behavior, and bad habits, judgments and hot takes on colleagues and senior officials, etc.). The thematic repertoire is considered as a deliberate communicative choice of a journalist, conditioned by the dramaturgy of public dialogue addressed to a mass audience and the tasks of portrayal.The author reveals the distinctive methods of requesting information and eliciting facts, which is inherent to the journalistic style of Yu. Dud: illocutionary forcing reasoning (“why-questions”), clarifying questions, reformulating, role modeling of relations with a guest, where the journalist often pretends being dilettante. Interpretation and evaluation of the interlocutor's statements are based on the clearest identification of their position for the mass addressee by an explication of ideas expressed by the guest implicitly, “delegation of opinion”, and the effects of “insight”.The choice of the language code indicates the “discursive adaptation” of the journalist to his interlocutor and allows the journalist to reveal to the mass audience their personality, including their speech characteristics. The dynamism of the dialogue is due to the setting to dramatize the conversation scenario: this is manifested not only in the choice of somewhat unexpected topics of conversation, but also in the expression of one's attitude to the statements of the interlocutor, explicit/implicit assessments, and the choice of the speech code.Conclusion. It is concluded that Dud’s interviews are a vivid example of the trends of modern Internet journalism, and the communicative strategies he implements allow us to see the prospects for the development of the genre. Given the popularity of the genre in traditional and new media, the author notices that the interview not only reflects the features of social communications of the 21st century but is also a powerful factor of shaping modern mass culture.

scholarly journals SciFi Cinema as one of Spatial Localizations of Military Images in American Mass Culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 77-86
Author(s):  
Kyrchanoff Maksym W. ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Military Experience ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
Modern Mass ◽  
Military Images

War is one of the most popular topics in modern mass culture. The author analyzes the features of the perception of war in modern science fiction cinema. The purpose of this article is to analyze the representation of war in American science fiction as a form of historical memory in mass culture. The author uses inventionism methods to analyze the images of war in the film production of mass culture as “invented traditions” of the consumer society. The range of perception of war and military experience in popular culture is analyzed. Modern global film industry and national film industries regularly address military themes in the world or national contexts, producing films that actualize military experience of nations and states. The film industry segments that specialize in the production of science fiction and fantasy films also do not ignore the military theme. It is supposed that popular culture offers a variety of images of war, including militarism, violence, military collective trauma, and military political psychosis. The author believes that military theme in popular culture arose as a result of reflection on real military conflicts, and the creators of the pop-cultural project could reject the war or idealize it. The author believes that military science fiction in modern American mass culture actualizes the values of pacifism or militarism as reflections of the left or right preferences of the creators of such cultural product for the consumer society. Science fiction films actualize various forms of war, including global military clashes, civil conflicts, aggression, intervention and genocide. Popular culture is becoming the main sphere of existence of the memory of war because military conflicts of science fiction series can be perceived in the consumer society as more real than the historical wars of the past. Military images of mass culture are supposed to actualize various forms of war memory, including memory as trauma, memory as marginalization, and memory as nostalgia which idealize war.

scholarly journals The Zombie as a Mirror of Modern Mass Culture

Corpus Mundi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 15-39
Author(s):  
Serguey N. Yakushenkov ◽  
Olesya S. Yakushenkova
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
External Threats ◽  
The World ◽  
Plantation Life ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Original Habitat ◽  
Modern Mass

Zombies were and still are one of the most important symbols of modern mass culture. The zombie discourse originated among African slaves brought to the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In many ways, the narratives of the “living dead” were a reaction to the crisis phenomena of plantation life. This is evidenced by the rich comparative material presented on many peoples of the world. Such notions of invulnerability after formal death proved to be an important tool of resistance to new conditions caused by external threats. Termed “revitalization,” they were an important element of the Millennialist movements. While initially the sorcerers who could bring themselves back to life were central to these beliefs, in the following period the focus shifted to the victims of various manipulations, transformed into soulless beings. Leaving the environment of their original “habitat,” zombies took on a new life, occupying a firm place in modern mass culture. Having become a symbol of ruthless exploitation of man, relegated to the level of a machine appendage, zombies proved to be one of the most “productive” symbols. They reflected the main trends in the development of society and even began to function as instruments of philosophical reflection. All this allows us to consider zombies as an indicator of altered society, producing new “walking dead”. The metaphors associated with zombies allows us to conclude that the comprehension of zombies makes modern man begin to perceive them constructively, creating a new image, demonstrating the movement towards humanization.

scholarly journals Eternal Middle Ages: Time Models in Modern Mass Culture

2015 ◽  
pp. 38-43
Author(s):  
A. I. Pozharov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Cultural Artifacts ◽  
Modern Mass ◽  
The Middle Ages

Eternal Middle Ages: Time Models in Modern Mass Culture (by Aleksey Pozharov). Nowadays in the works of mass culture, a remarkable interest in the Middle Ages is noticed. According to many cultural studies, it is not so much the historical Middle Ages reflected in the cultural artifacts as it is the contemporary society set in medieval surroundings. What images and ideas does the modern mass culture deliver? In order to deal with this issue, it’s necessary to consider one of the fundamental concerns of civilization: which model of time is relevant to the contemporary cultural artifacts.

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