Introduction: Searching for Gold in an Age of Iron

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Meredith E. Safran
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Patrimony ◽  
Historical Societies

This volume introduction analyzes a pervasive fantasy in American popular media: the desire to escape an “iron age” deemed materially and morally degraded in comparison with an idealized lost world that people hope somehow to recover. This idealized “golden age” is viewed with the painful longing of nostalgia and the sorrow of belatedness from the degraded “iron age” of the viewer’s present time, often accompanied by inquiry into how and why golden conditions no longer obtain. Self-proclaimed heirs to classical antiquity’s cultural patrimony adopted this myth with alacrity, and its deployment can be traced continuously throughout the classical tradition, including in popular media not conventionally associated with classicism. The introduction reviews key strands of golden-age discourse in ancient Greek and Roman texts, including views on human-divine relations, gender relations, and technological innovations; and modern receptions of historical societies as golden ages to be emulated, especially Periclean Athens, Thermopylae-era Sparta, and Augustan Rome. Case studies include the Vergilian concept of “Arcadia” as deployed in the sci-fi television series The 100 and “golden age thinking” as a psychological malady in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Screening the Golden Ages of the Classical Tradition

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Historical Societies ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Religious Piety ◽  
Building Activities

Screening the Golden Ages of the Classical Tradition explores how films and television programs have engaged with one of the most powerful myths in the Western classical tradition: that humans once lived under ideal conditions, as defined by proximity to the divine. We feel nostalgia for this imagined origin, regret at being born too late to enjoy it, and worry over why we lost it. We seek to recover that “golden age” by religious piety—or, by technological innovation, try to create our own utopia. The breach between this imagined world and lived reality renders these mythical constructs as powerful political tools. For the “golden age” concept influences how participants in the Western classical tradition view our own times by comparison, as an “iron age” whose degradation we lament and wish to escape. This “golden age” complex has manifested in the world-building activities of ancient Greek and Roman texts, from Hesiod to Suetonius, and in modernity’s hagiographic memory of certain historical societies: Periclean Athens, Thermopylae-era Sparta, and Augustan Rome. These fourteen collected essays discuss how golden age themes animate screen texts ranging from prestige projects like Gladiator and HBO’s Rome, to cult classics like Xanadu and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, to films made by auteurs including Jules Dassin’s Phaedra and the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? Essays also examine the classical “golden age” tradition in fantasy (Game of Thrones), science fiction (Serenity), horror (The Walking Dead), war/combat (the 300 franchise, Centurion, The Eagle), and the American Western.

Order Restored? Chinese Masculinities in the German Crime Television Series Tatort

2018 ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Arnhilt Johanna Hoefle
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Television Program ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Chinese Men ◽  
The World ◽  
German Speaking

This chapter studies the depiction of Chinese protagonists in the crime series Tatort, the most extensive and longest-running fictional television program in the German-speaking countries. The analysis takes four episodes between 1991 and 2013 as case studies, arguing that different images of Chinese characters, and in particular Chinese men, have created some of the most daring and destabilizing scenarios in the series. Carefully negotiating the rules of both the genre of the detective narrative and the serial form, these episodes stage a narrative cycle of crime and solution, crisis and recovery, which is significantly placed within the realm of masculinities. The episodes thus allow unique insights into the ways popular media have confronted and reflected European anxieties facing China’s growing and threatening power in the world since the 1990s.

Muslim like us: mobilizing minority identities in popular Australian entertainment media as sites of transnational representation

2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110227
Author(s):  
Benjamin Nickl
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
Film Productions ◽  
Muslim Identities ◽  
Minority Identities

In the context of sustained interest in the mobilization of Muslimness beyond generic and hence immobile identity tropes, I consider how Australian mainstream television and film productions work to challenge and disrupt essentialist representations of Muslimness. Case studies feature two television series and a feature film, examined through the lens of transnational mobility theory and in the context of mediated anti-racism. The productions I discuss, ‘The Spice Journey’, ‘The Mosque Next Door’, and ‘Down Under’, all turn on intra- and inter-communal mobility of Muslim identities. They are part of a larger trend in popular media productions in current Australian film and on television, which reacts to Islamophobic sentiments in the country by drawing attention to embodied multiple subjectivities. Findings suggest that Australian entertainment media can add meaningful input to the diverse and complex negotiations of culture and identity among Muslims in Australia but may sidestep other forms of racism like anti-Indigeneity in the process.

scholarly journals Responsible innovation, anticipation and responsiveness: case studies of algorithms in decision support in justice and security, and an exploration of potential, unintended, undesirable, higher-order effects

AI and Ethics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Steen ◽  
Tjerk Timan ◽  
Ibo van de Poel
Keyword(s):  
Decision Support ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Responsible Innovation ◽  
Order Effects ◽  
Key Dimensions ◽  
Higher Order Effects

AbstractThe collection and use of personal data on citizens in the design and deployment of algorithms in the domain of justice and security is a sensitive topic. Values like fairness, autonomy, privacy, accuracy, transparency and property are at stake. Negative examples of algorithms that propagate or exacerbate biases, inequalities or injustices have received ample attention, both in academia and in popular media. To supplement this view, we will discuss two positive examples of Responsible Innovation (RI): the design and deployment of algorithms in decision support, with good intentions and careful approaches. We then explore potential, unintended, undesirable, higher-order effects of algorithms—effects that may occur despite good intentions and careful approaches. We do that by engaging with anticipation and responsiveness, two key dimensions of Responsible Innovation. We close the paper with proposing a framework and a series of tentative recommendations to promote anticipation and responsiveness in the design and deployment of algorithms in decision support in the domain of justice and security.

Broken Eagles: The Iron Age of Imperial Roman Warfare in Post-9/11 Film

2018 ◽  
pp. 243-258
Author(s):  
Alex McAuley
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Post Traumatic Stress ◽  
Roman Army ◽  
Post Traumatic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Imperial State ◽  
Fundamental Shift

In the second of three chapters that address Rome’s complicated legacy as an imperial state, McAuley contrasts the mid-twentieth century “golden old days” of ancient-world epics, which represented Roman soldiers as consummate professionals and warfare as neatly executed, with recent representations of the Roman army for post-9/11 audiences: a new “iron age” of betrayal, despair, and post-traumatic stress disorder. These films reflect a fundamental shift in the psychology of warfare and killing since Vietnam, which has created a vastly different and more ambiguous kind of conflict than the Cold-War binary of Spartacus (1960).McAuley examines the impact of this paradigm shift on contemporary depictions of the Roman army and its soldiers: first, by considering the “golden age” of Roman warfare in films from the 1950s and 1960s, in contrast with the dystopic view of Centurion(2010) and The Eagle (2011). He then traces the depiction of the individual Roman soldier in each era. Finally, he examines the broader contemporary context for post-9/11 depictions of antiquity: the growing body of films about the War on Terror, with which films like Centurion and The Eagle have far more in common than with their golden-age predecessors.

Confronting the Ancient Greek Golden Age in Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1962)

2018 ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
Emma Scioli
Keyword(s):  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Myth ◽  
The World

In the second of three chapters examining Athens’ golden-age legacy, Scioli traces how Jules Dassin repeatedly draws attention to the origins of his 1962 melodrama Phaedra in Greek myth and tragedy through visual imagery, as a complement to his 1960 comedy Never on Sunday. Phaedra’s use of ancient Athenian art, and its suggestive modernization of elements from the ancient Athenian tragedyHippolytusand Racine’s 1677 adaptation Phèdre, force a confrontation with a particular modern formulation of the ancient Greek past. Dassin draws upon the golden age to characterize the world of ancient Greece that irrupts into the early 1960s setting of the film both visually and thematically. Rather than fostering nostalgia for a golden age that might prompt a desire for its return, Phaedra presents it as an intrusive presence from which its characters feel alienated, only to demonstrate that they are inextricably bound, in their modern dress, to repeat what the tragic past has prescribed for them. Such self-conscious appropriation of Athens’ literary-dramatic and artistic-material remains informs the tragic belatedness of Phaedra and reflects upon the American expatriate director’s sense of foreignness in the homeland of his lover and artistic muse, Greek actress and activist Melina Mercouri.

Gilding American History through Song Culture in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Ryan Platte
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
American History ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
American South ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Epochal Change ◽  
Depression Era

In the first of two chapters investigating the role of Homeric epic in fabricating golden ages, Platte reveals how Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which proclaims its debt to Homer’s Odyssey in the opening credits, also re-enacts Homeric epic’s creation of a golden age. Platte focuses on the role of song in generating ancient and modern societies’ gilded memories of the past, including the nostalgia-laden misremembering of the Depression-era American South in which the film is set. Platte emphasizes how technological change affected the American folk-song tradition through recording – a phenomenon similar to that which changed Greek song culture into “Homeric” epic. By focusing on a moment of epochal change, the filmmakers undercut the notion that folk music is a simple and genuine artefact of the past. Instead, invoking nostalgia through song exposes the artificiality of the traffic in nostalgia, which has shaped attitudes toward the ancient Greek and modern American pasts. Through the protagonist’s encounter with two Homer avatars, the Coens dramatize both the process of nostalgia-creation for such a golden age and the rejection of attempts to politically weaponize it: in this case, by obscuring racism in romantic depictions of the “Old South.”

El Baile Del Pueblo

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-261
Author(s):  
Sean Bellaviti
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Commercial Music ◽  
Cultural Patrimony ◽  
National Pride ◽  
National Music ◽  
Television Audience

In this final chapter, the author provides a macro perspective of the música típica genre as a form of national music, focusing on the challenges musicians face as performers of a popular commercial music that is, at the same time, firmly rooted in folkloric traditions to which Panamanians remain deeply attached. Through a series of case studies, the author shows that the “pull” of tradition is a constant in música típica musicians’ lives. This is never more evident than in ongoing discussions regarding what to call this music and the challenge of sorting out the demands of baile performance as distinguished from shows patronized by concertgoers, or even viewed by a nation-wide television audience. This sense of música típica’s unchanging nature also lies at the heart of the perplexity and frustration felt by performers when they consider the unrivalled popularity música típica enjoys in Panama even as it is virtually unknown beyond the country’s borders. Finally, when compared to most other forms of popular music in Panama, the sense of national pride provoked by música típica’s connection to folkloric music and the fact that it is embraced by so many Panamanians means that musicians are praised for their contributions to modernizing the genre even as they run the risk of being accused of undermining what is regarded by many Panamanians as the nation’s cultural patrimony.

Expanded Cultural Heritage Representation

2017 ◽  
pp. 256-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Meschini ◽  
Daniele Rossi ◽  
Enrica Petrucci ◽  
Filippo Sicuranza
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Educational Approach ◽  
Augmented Virtuality ◽  
Real Objects ◽  
The City ◽  
Different Levels

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate some of the opportunities offered by technological innovations, in particular referring the specific application areas of Augmented Reality and Augmented Virtuality. The contribution presents a series of applications based on effective tests of innovative communication, which are characterized by different levels of interactivity and immersion. The general subject of interest is the city of Ascoli Piceno considering both the city as a whole and particular places/buildings of value (case studies). The central aim is to construct an informational/educational approach to real objects in innovative terms, experimenting each time with the most useful ‘container' (communicational product) to enable the best knowledge of a determined heritage.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document