scholarly journals Genealogy of Refusal

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Natalie Meyers ◽  
Anna Michelle Martinez-Montavon ◽  
Mikala Narlock ◽  
Kim Stathers
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Parks And Recreation ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Film Clips ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
Crisis Narratives

Why can’t librarians “Just Say No”? To answer this question, we look at workplace refusal through the fine arts, literature, and popular culture to construct a genealogy of workplace refusal. In it, we also begin to trace a lineage of crisis narrative critique alongside the library profession’s inheritance of vocational awe. We explore the librarian’s role and voice through the lens of both popular culture and academic publications. In our companion multimedia, hypertextual Scalar project also titled A Genealogy of Refusal: Walking Away from Crisis and Scarcity Narratives, we contextualize strategies of refusal in libraries through critical response to and annotations of film clips and illustrations. We examine gender differences in portrayals of workplace refusal. We laugh when in Parks and Recreation a stereotypical librarian ignores a stripper but warns noisy patrons: “Shh—This is a library!” We are horrified when aspiring librarians in Morgenstern’s Starless Sea, hands tied behind their backs, have their tongues torn from their mouths. Elinguation as a job prerequisite? No, thanks. The implications of saying “No” are many. We explicate ways librarians are made vulnerable by crisis narratives and constructed scarcity. We advocate for asset framing and developing fluencies in hearing and saying “No.” Looking forward, how long will it take librarians to reclaim “Yes” in a way that works for us?

scholarly journals Happy Christmases are All Alike; Each Unhappy Christmas is Unhappy in its Own Way

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-184
Author(s):  
Vivien Blanchet
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Postal Service ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
The World ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
Ritual Practices

The French postal service has been opening a bureau for Father Christmas every winter since 1962. Sixty employees are responsible for responding to letters to Father Christmas. In 2018, more than one million children corresponded with him. But what would happen if someone were to write to Father Christmas, developing a close epistolary relationship with him? This short story explores such a scenario. Pierre M. and Father Christmas have during many years maintained regular and personal correspondence. Yet Father Christmas’s attitude seems to have changed. Pierre M. reveals the evolution of their secret relationship to his mysterious friend. On substance, the short story offers an original perspective on modern marketplace mythologies. Previous studies depict myths as liminal spaces in which people negotiate contradictory meanings, practices and realities. The myth of Father Christmas thus involves compromises between ignorance and knowledge, life and death, the sacred and the profane. The short story tells how they evolve to define the identity of the protagonists and the world they live in. It highlights how they are embodied in hybrid artefacts like letters to Father Christmas and extraordinary servicescape. The short story also questions the performative force of the myth. It shows that it results from the interpretative work and ritual practices of the protagonists involved in an unstable actantial system structured around an enlightened person, an ignorant person and a mythical character. This is constantly negotiated throughout sociotechnical interactions, which, as in the case of witchcraft, may or may not realize the myth. On form, the short story adopts the principle of the eternal return inherent to the myth: it is plotted as a series of small variations on recurring themes and structural repetitions. Intertextual references to academic publications, literary tradition and popular culture enrich the narrative by extending it beyond its textual boundaries.

scholarly journals Budaya Berhibur Menerusi Aplikasi Smule Dalam Karya Arca Instalasi

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-52
Author(s):  
Aznan Omar ◽  
◽  
Syed Alwi Syed Abu Bakar ◽  
Mahizan Hijaz Muhammad ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Visual Narratives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Digital Entertainment ◽  
Social Media Platforms

This research project is an interpretation of a societal phenomenon in terms of the culture of using digital application for leisure and entertainment especially regarding the human behaviour and its obsession of using these applications in the social media platforms. This idea was translated by using the idea of an installation of a fabricated sculpture. The idea of how the digital media plays a major role for leisure and its obsession was inspired by the artist Scott Snibbe. This reference includes on how netizens utilize and share their interests and interactions with these digital media, games and other kinds of digital media entertainments. The method used for this practical studio research are through self critical evaluation, studio experimentation and contextual reviews. This research project was intended to contribute to the field of fine arts in terms of collecting symbolic visual narratives and its issues of the collective culture in regarding of leisure and entertainment and its popularity as a life style today. With hope this research project will give a major impact in terms of understanding towards its trend and the digital entertainment itself. The variation, the ever changing content of its application has impacted the popular culture itself through its spirit and behaviour, the wants and needs projected by the new expression of consumerism.

scholarly journals Everybody’s Holocaust? Tova Reich’s Satirical Approach to Shoah Business and the Cult of Victimhood

Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Stanislav Kolář
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Millennium

This paper sets out to demonstrate the changes that post-Holocaust fiction has been undergoing since around the turn of the new millennium. It analyzes the highly innovative and often provocative approaches to the Holocaust and its memory found in Tova Reich’s novel My Holocaust—a scathing satire on the personal and institutional exploitation of Holocaust commemoration, manifested in the commodification of the historical trauma in what has been termed “Shoah business”. The novel can be seen as a reaction to the increasing appropriation of the Holocaust by popular culture. This paper focuses on Reich’s critical response to the cult of victimhood and the unhealthy competition for Holocaust primacy, corresponding with the growth of a “victim culture”. It also explores other thematic aspects of the author’s satire—the abuse of the term “Holocaust” for personal, political and ideological purposes; attempts to capitalize on the suffering of millions of victims; the trivialization of this tragedy; conflicts between particularists and universalists in their attitude to the Shoah; and criticism of Holocaust-centered Judaism. The purpose of this paper is to show how Tova Reich has enriched post-Holocaust fiction by presenting a comic treatment of false victimary discourse, embodied by a fraudulent survivor and a whole gallery of inauthentic characters. This paper highlights the novel’s originality, which enables it to step outside the frame of traditional Holocaust fiction.

From Fiction to History and Back: The Tale, Its Versions and Its Afterlives

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Marlé Hammond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Western Model ◽  
The Creation

This chapter introduces the fictional tale by tracing its evolution from its unknown origins in what was probably the seventeenth century to its historicisation and Christianisation in the nineteenth century, to its infiltration of popular culture and the fine arts in the twentieth century. Its adaptations across various media, including literature, cinema and music, are explored. The chapter furthermore shows how the tale inscribes the endemic paradigms of the ʿUdhrī love narrative and the popular epic or sīra with the western model of the damsel-in-distress fairy tale. Finally, the chapter relates the process by which the tale becomes absorbed into Arabic culture to Yuri Lotman’s notion of the ‘boundary’ as the site of artistic innovation and the creation of new genres.

scholarly journals Whose Canon? Culturalization versus Democratization

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-274
Author(s):  
Erling Bjurström
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
Representational Model ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

Current accounts – and particularly the critique – of canon formation are primarily based on some form of identity politics. In the 20th century a representational model of social identities replaced cultivation as the primary means to democratize the canons of the fine arts. In a parallel development, the discourse on canons has shifted its focus from processes of inclusion to those of exclusion. This shift corresponds, on the one hand, to the construction of so-called alternative canons or counter-canons, and, on the other hand, to attempts to restore the authority of canons considered to be in a state of crisis or decaying. Regardless of the democratic stance of these efforts, the construction of alternatives or the reestablishment of decaying canons does not seem to achieve their aims, since they break with the explicit and implicit rules of canon formation. Politically motivated attempts to revise or restore a specific canon make the workings of canon formation too visible, transparent and calculated, thereby breaking the spell of its imaginary character. Retracing the history of the canonization of the fine arts reveals that it was originally tied to the disembedding of artists and artworks from social and worldly affairs, whereas debates about canons of the fine arts since the end of the 20th century are heavily dependent on their social, cultural and historical reembedding. The latter has the character of disenchantment, but has also fettered the canon debate in notions of “our” versus “their” culture. However, by emphasizing the dedifferentiation of contemporary processes of culturalization, the advancing canonization of popular culture seems to be able to break with identity politics that foster notions of “our” culture in the present thinking on canons, and push it in a more transgressive, syncretic or hybrid direction.

The armless artist and the lightning cartoonist: performing popular culture at the Crystal Palace c.1900

After 1851 ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
The Past ◽  
Crystal Palace

Discussions of art at the Crystal Palace have largely focussed on sculpture and architecture from the past contained in its Fine Arts Courts. This chapter explores the role of art via a different trajectory using the paper trail of popular culture contained in the Daily Programme of events and the Crystal Palace’s own magazine, to reveal its connections to two artists who worked at the Palace around 1900. Drawing on contemporary popular journalism of the period, this chapter engages with representations of the artists Bertram Hiles and Herbert Beecroft as part of commercialised forms of leisure available at the Crystal Palace. The case studies of these two artists temporarily working in residence at Sydenham brings into focus the role of the Crystal Palace in modern consumer practices that in turn embraced the visual pleasures of gazing and looking. Far from the high moral tone of the original Hyde Park enterprise, the work of Hiles and Beecroft fused the visual pleasures offered by art with popular entertainment.

Listen to This

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Svorinich
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Single Event ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Original Analysis ◽  
Miles Davis ◽  
The Face ◽  
Bitches Brew ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Musical Context

When Bitches Brew was released, it was not just another jazz album, but a major single event, with ramifications rippling over the next forty-plus years. Not only did Miles Davis change the face of jazz once again by launching the entire jazz-fusion movement, he changed all of modern music. Listen to This looks in detail at the making of Bitches Brew, exploring the inner workings of Davis at his creative peak, and provides resolution to many of the controversies that have plagued this record since its inception. It revisits the mysteries surrounding the album and places it into both a historical and musical context using new interviews, original analysis, recently found recordings, unearthed session data sheets, letters, musical transcriptions, scores, and other associated data. Listen to This is not just the story of Bitches Brew. It reveals the legend of Miles Davis, his attitude, his relationship to the masses, his business and personal etiquette, and his response to extraordinary social conditions determined to bring him down. Listen to This unveils this iconic figure’s complex psyche and his impact on both the fine arts and popular culture through one of the greatest recordings ever made.

Beyond nostalgia for the Soviet past: Interpreting documentaries on Russian television

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Kalinina
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
Television Programming ◽  
Television Production ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Soviet Film ◽  
Film Clips ◽  
Russian Media

The proliferation and recycling of Soviet popular culture and history is a central ingredient of post-Soviet film and television production, leading to accusations that the Russian media is nurturing nostalgia. Nostalgia can hardly account for the manifold uses of the Soviet past in contemporary Russian television programming. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the Crimean annexation, it became evident that nostalgia for a strong empire with a ‘strong ruling hand’ was part of Putin’s symbolic politics for several years. Keeping these considerations in mind, this article investigates how nostalgia extends into the domain of television and becomes an element of symbolic politics, employing a case study of two documentaries produced during Putin’s presidency to focus the analysis. This study also examines how contemporary Russian television uses footage and film clips from the socialist period and witness testimonies to ‘dismantle’ popular myths.

Roll Over Beethoven, there's a New way to be Cool

Contexts ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
High Status ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Masses

For generations, preference for “high” and disdain for “popular” culture was a means the elite used to distinguish themselves from the masses. In sharp contrast, the display of high status today relies on familiarity with the full range of cultural fare. This change in evaluation of status poses a challenge for the future of the fine arts.

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