Brigitte Bardot: The Making, Recycling, and Afterlife of an Icon

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ginette Vincendeau
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Icon ◽  
Modern Media

This chapter highlights the dynamics of the modern media icon by analyzing how Brigitte Bardot was a star made by the image (photography and film) and by reconstructing how her celebrity survived through the image. It discusses the emergence, evolution and impact of Bardot as a cultural icon and her continued relevance long after she stopped making films in 1973. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how Bardot can be perceived as an icon in several senses – literally as the model of photographers, filmmakers and painters, culturally as creator and bearer of fashion and lifestyle that were widely imitated, and symbolically as the articulation of a sexualized rebellion against the conservative, patriarchal France of the time.

Passover Plots

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 201-222
Author(s):  
Richard G. Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Medical Student ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Modern Media ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
First Time ◽  
Foucault’S Pendulum

Various modern fictions, building upon the skeptical premises of biblical scholars, have claimed that the gospels covered up the real story about Jesus. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is one recent, popular example. While conspiracy theories may seem peculiar to modern media, the gospels have their own versions of hidden secrets. For Mark, e.g., Roman discourse about crucifixion obscures two secret plots in Jesus’ passion, which the gospel reveals: the religious leaders’ conspiracy to dispatch Jesus and the hidden divine program to sacrifice Jesus. Mark unveils these secret plots by minimizing the passion’s material details (the details of suffering would glorify Rome), substituting the Jewish leaders for the Romans as the important human actors, interpreting the whole as predicted by scripture and by Jesus, and bathing the whole in an irony that claims that the true reality is other than it seems. The resulting divine providence/conspiracy narrative dooms Jesus—and everyone else—before the story effectively begins. None of this would matter if secret plots and infinite books did not remain to make pawns or “phantoms of us all” (Borges). Thus, in Borges’ “The Gospel According to Mark,” an illiterate rancher family after hearing the gospel for the first time, read to them by a young medical student, crucifies the young man. Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum is less biblical but equally enthralled by conspiracies that consume their obsessive believers. Borges and Eco differ from Mark, from some scholarship, and from recent popular fiction, in their insistence that such conspiracy tales are not “true” or “divine,” but rather humans’ own self-destructive fictions. Therein lies a different kind of hope than Mark’s, a very human, if very fragile, hope.

The End of the Word as We Know It

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 165-184
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Cultural Icon ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Material Objectivity ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship

This essay attends to a distinction that requires closer examination and theorization in our discourse on iconic books and other scriptures: the difference between iconic object and cultural icon. How do we conceive of relations between the particular, ritualized iconicities of particular scriptures in particular religious contexts and the cultural iconicities of scriptures in general, such as “the Bible” or “the Quran,” whose visual and material objectivity is highly ambiguous? How if at all are the iconic cultural meanings of the ideas of such books related to the particular iconic textual objects more or less instantiate them? These questions are explored through particular focus on the relationship between the particular iconicities of particular print Bibles, as iconic objects, and the general iconicity of the cultural icon of the Bible.

PECULIARITIES AND CONDITIONS OF ACTIVITY OF BOOK PUBLISHING HOUSES OF UKRAINE IN THE MODERN MEDIA SPACE

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tetyana Jezhyzhanska
Keyword(s):  
Information Technologies ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Book Publishing ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Modern Media ◽  
Media Space ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Book Publishers

In the information society the status of information is changing: this main value of global civilization becomes an important resource of socio- economic, technological and cultural development. The rapid development of virtual technologies and the growing number of Internet users in Ukraine and in the world causes the new challenges to communication of each organization. The book publishers are also obliged to respond to these processes. However, the works devoted directly to publishers’ communication in the modern media space are still lacking in Ukraine. The objective of the article is to clarify peculiarities and conditions of the activities of Ukrainian book publishers in today’s media space which is an important issue today. It is analyzed the literature and sources on this issue and it is ascertained the theoretical and practical possibilities to take into account the trends in the world of modern media in the PR-activity of book publishers. Also the prospects for further scientific study and practical use of PR-communications in the activity of publishers are determined. The analysis of current changes in the modern information space allows us to trace the general tendencies: the new subject and object areas are formed; the number of subjects is expanded; the new formats of interaction within the system of communications of the organization and in society as a whole are created. That means that publishing house’s PR-communications are complicated by the emergence of new elements, such as active audience, social networks as communication channels, promotions on the Internet and others. PR communication in the Internet space is the most effective and inexpensive tool for interaction of publishers with active audiences. Thus, the activation of PR communication in the modern media space is associated with the emergence of the latest information technologies, online media as well as development of Internet. The use of online channels of Internet for communication with the target audience of publishing organizations has certain advantages over traditional media. At the same time, it is necessary to take into account the information saturation of media space, which complicates the way of PR-messages of book publishers to the reader.

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