1,702 research outputs found

    Citizens, consumers and the demands of market-driven news.

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    Consumption Matters

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    Painting and Stuff, LOL

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    Our own human experience is a distinct realm which can never be precisely duplicated in another lifetime. It frames our whole view of existence and, as artists, affects our art making process. The theory of the Tabula Rasa functions as the inspiration of my work and this writing examines my personal view of growing up in the internet age and America, and how my view of life, as well as artistic practice, is shaped by a consumerist culture that has gone global. Additionally, as a figurative painter, I create a context with other artists who create work about their own experience such as Liu Xiaodong, Jan Steen, Kehinde Wiley, Patrick Martinez, and Roger Shimomura. This paper ties many facets of culture together, along with my personal reflection, to ultimately examine its effect on my art

    La Belle Dame in bobby socks :Keatsian Echoes in Lolita

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    This project will explore the various Romantic influences that Nabokov simultaneously draws and draws away from in Lolita. By analyzing the novel in relation to Keats\u27s narrative poems, I will show the ways Nabokov veered from traditional Romantic structures in the trope of courtly love and in images of consumption and consumerism and how he linked the two different notions of consumption in the novel

    Political consumerism as a neoliberal response to youth political disengagement

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    Recent trends indicate diminishing public engagement with formal electoral politics in many advanced liberal democracies, especially among the younger generations. However, evidence also suggests that there has been a simultaneous interest by many young citizens in political consumerism. In large part, this interest is shaped as a response to the individualisation and strict ‘economism’ driven by the underlying forces of neoliberalism. Disenfranchised and disillusioned by the seeming incapacity of the purely political sphere to respond to their individualised claims, and having internalised the neoliberal critique of democracy, these young empowered citizen-consumers often search for the ‘political’ within the bounds of the marketplace and are increasingly attracted to consumerist methods of political participation, such as boycotting and buycotting. Given the susceptibility of political consumerism to a neoliberal modus operandi, the lack of available literature problematising its emergence as a response to neoliberal principles is somewhat surprising. The present article will address this gap by connecting the declining levels of electoral participation among younger generations in post-crisis Europe to the rise of political consumerism within the neoliberal ideological hegemony of the ‘marketopoly’. We distinguish between two antithetical, but complimentary effects. Firstly, the internalised neoliberal critique of democracy emphasises the ‘push’ out of the public into the commercial sphere. Secondly, the emerging individualisation of modern ‘liquid’ politics advanced by the postmaterialist sensitivities of young people’s previously affluent socialisation call attention to the existence of a parallel ‘pull’ effect into the ‘marketopoly’, as a habitus of youth political participation. In both cases, the reorganisation of political participation as consumption, and the re-styling of young citizens as ‘empowered’ consumers, delineates political consumerism as an efficacious response to their political disengagement in an increasingly marketised world

    Americanization of Chinese television: ---A critical analysis of \u27Yearning for Love\u27

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    President Deng\u27s promulgation of taking bolder steps in economic reform sanctioned the building a socialist market economy that led Chinese society to experience a sweeping change, while also becoming the site affected by U.S. - led cultural imperialism. In the new climate of social reform, mass media led the way in creating an awareness of commercial identity and branding. One interesting phenomenon in this development is the increasing number of cloned foreign entertainment shows that have seized the entire nation\u27s attention, giving rise to a national cloning mania. To examine the cultural impact of cloned media shows, this paper focuses on one particular television series, Yearning for Love, in an attempt to scrutinize the typical capitalist ideological values inherent in the cloned media content and analyze their promotion through televisual presentation. The analysis demonstrates that cloned media shows feature the materialist and individualist elements of capitalist countries, especially the ones that are in tune with consumer culture. Meanwhile, Chinese traditional cultural values, originality and creativity are sidelined by capitalist ideology and the profit-driven pro-west media products promoting them

    The Jordanian Novel in Postmodern Context

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    As the Jordanian culture is gradually impacted by the globalization process of late capitalism, this study argues that many Jordanian novels exhibit a number of postmodern characteristics, such as blurring boundaries and disrupting hierarchies, the use of pastiche as a compositional technique, formal fragmentation, and the weakness of utopian imagination. Adopting Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism as a framework, the study explores ten Jordanian novels written between 1986 and 2016 to demonstrate that the modernization process and the cultural changes in the Arab world, in general, and in the Jordanian society, in particular, have increased the density of postmodern features in the Jordanian novels. Therefore, the conventional categorization of Jordanian novels as postcolonial works is challenged by the proliferation of postmodern features in such works. The study also attempts to illustrate that the novels that are written toward the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century display more postmodern characteristics. For comparison purposes, Arab and non-Arab postmodern novels are engaged in this discussion

    The Mass Media in David Foster Wallace’s Selected Short Stories

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    This paper deals with the treatment of the mass media in a selection of short stories written by the American postmodernist author David Foster Wallace. The first section of the paper gives us a brief theoretical background about the genre of the short story in American literature, the life and works of the author, and the evolution of the mass media. Then, the second section focuses on an article written by the author which deals with television and its relation with American literature. Finally, the last three sections present the analysis of three of the most important mass media, which are television, advertising and press, in a selection of short stories extracted from two of David Foster Wallace’s collections.Este trabajo versa sobre el tratamiento de los medios de comunicación de masas en una selección de relatos breves escritos por el autor postmodernista americano David Foster Wallace. La primera sección del trabajo nos da un breve contexto teórico sobre el género del relato breve en la literatura americana, la vida y obras del autor y la evolución de los medios de comunicación de masas. A continuación, la segunda sección se centra en un artículo escrito por el autor que trata sobre la televisión y su relación con la literatura americana. Finalmente, las tres últimas secciones presentan el análisis de tres de los medios de comunicación de masas más importantes, los cuales son televisión, publicidad y prensa, en una selección de relatos breves extraídos de dos de las colecciones de David Foster Wallace.Departamento de Filología InglesaGrado en Estudios Inglese

    Heterotopia in Contemporary Russian Fiction

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    This dissertation examines Russian culture of the twenty-first century by analyzing fiction and film with speculative elements. Each chapter focuses on the core concerns of a particular author: Pelevin’s preoccupation with neocolonialism and empire, Slavnikova’s contrast between dystopian history and “utopian” death, Sorokin’s interest in historical trauma and the inner workings of terror, and Fedorchenko and Osokin’s eccentric utopian projects. The dissertation helps to understand contemporary culture, since speculative fiction’s imagined realities and envisioned futures are closely connected with sociocultural tendencies. The sustained investigation of the 2000s is merited by the fact that “the Zeroes,” as the decade is known in Russia, is characterized by significant cultural shifts. Compared to the 1990s, the 2000s can be seen in terms of a gradual turn towards much more conservative notions of identity that are often expressed through changing interpretations of Russian and Soviet history, as well as a reevaluation of Russia’s geopolitical role—topics that are central in both political discourses and cultural imaginary. A number of works in contemporary Russian fiction and film creatively reimagine geographic space and history. This fiction and film oscillate between utopian and dystopian modalities and combine ambiguous utopias/dystopias with supernatural elements. While sharing certain features with more traditional genres, these works fall outside of such traditional genre designations as utopias/dystopias and magical realism. To account for this genre hybridity, my project posits Michel Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia” as a critical lens for my analysis of this fiction. I understand heterotopia as a textual strategy in fiction and film that includes utopian/dystopian and fantastic elements, and that, through unusual temporal and spatial structures, interrogate dominant discourses and identity formations. Because of its ability to create a number of possible worlds, this textual strategy allows contemporary authors to both contest and engage with dominant cultural practices and discourses
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