New Books in Popular Culture

What are the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of communications at the University of Glasgow‘s Centre for Cultural Policy Research, explores this question by focusing on the idea of talent. The book offers a rich theoretical and empirical engagement with the contemporary television landscape, giving detailed analysis of the history of talent development, as well as the impact of digital and new platforms. The shifting landscape of talent, television, and the infrastructure of cultural intermediaries is illustrated with key case studies, ultimately showing how the winners and losers of the talent industry map onto existing inequalities. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

When talking about the American South in the second half of the twentieth century, popular discourse tended to fall into one of three camps (on occasion, two might coexist simultaneously): the “Vicious South” which was violent and regressive, the “Down Home South” which was traditional and family oriented, and the “Changing South” which was moving past its earlier racial strife. While the Vicious South archetype predominated and fit into a narrative that showed the South as un-American, unrepresentative of the larger country, and repressive, by the end of the 1960s perceptions of the South were changing. Americans in different parts of the country began to consider the different ways that the real or perceived culture of the South might offer solutions to racism, masculinity, modern ennui, and crime. Zachary Lechner’s The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980 (University of Georgia Press, 2018) looks at this cultural transformation in the United States in the period from 1960 to 1980. Lechner examines different forms of cultural production to see how the South was being understood at different moments. That understanding was in turn shaped by a desire to use elements of southern culture to overcome social and cultural problems in the United States. Shows like Andy Griffith showed a traditional southern way of life that was able to work past the problems of consumerist modernity, movies like Walking Tall showed men using violence to restore order and to end crime, and the musical counterculture found both musical technique and personal style to mine in country music and the South. This culminated in the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, whose persona was built in part on having insight into overcoming the racial and social strife that had plagued the rest of the country. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

One of the major aspects of the popular film industry are the fans who want to collect material related to their favorite films, actors, and actresses. While this has become generally easier in the age of the Internet, there is a long history of people who literally spent their entire lives gathering things. In his new book Magnificent Obsession: The Outrageous History of Film Buffs, Collectors, Scholars, and Fanatics (University Press of Mississippi, 2018), Anthony Slide presents an overview of these collectors, as well as how the hobby began. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In his new book, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU Press, 2018), James Bielo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, goes behind the scenes at Grant County, Kentucky’s creationist theme park, which opened in July 2016. Entertainment has long been understood as important aspect of Christianity in the US, but the theme park, which includes a re-creation of Noah’s ark, provides a striking setting through which to ask questions such as how creationists present their beliefs to the broader public. Ark Encounter is, in part, a workplace ethnography, which describes the entwined conceptual and aesthetic work through which the park’s design team imagine how to most effectively and playfully communicate a controversial religious perspective. Bielo’s findings are situated in discussion with other groundbreaking anthropological work on how categories such as ‘fundamentalist’ have been constructed over time, perhaps most notably Susan Harding’s scholarship. While the whole book is ethnographically rich and reflexive, an appendix describes in useful detail (for both readers and for those planning or currently engaged in their own research projects) the processes through which Bielo entered – and left – his fieldsite. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

How have academics been represented in children’s books? In Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, tells the story of the professor in children’s books since 1850. The book details the history of highly problematic depictions of academics, usually as kindly old men, baffled buffoons, or evil madmen, depictions that exclude those who are not white, often middle class origin, men. Terras’ work is a great example for digital humanities scholarship, offering a powerful case for new methods to answer crucial questions of equality and diversity for humanities scholars and across universities more generally. Alongside the analysis, Terras has published an anthology, The Professor in Children’s Literature, including some of the works discussed in the book. Both Picture-Book Professors and the accompanying anthology are open access and free to read, and will be of interest to every academic as well as the wider public too! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Kathryn Fuller-Seely, a Professor of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the acclaimed book on Jack Benny, delves into the groundbreaking career of this comedy legend. She discusses Benny’s transition from vaudeville to radio and his unique character-driven approach to sitcoms. Fuller-Seely reveals Benny's playful gender dynamics, the crucial role of Mary Livingstone, and how Benny's innovative integration of commercials brought new life to branded comedy. They also explore Benny's lasting impact on modern comedic forms.

What do Shakespeare and superheroes have in common? A penchant for lycra and capes? A flair for the dramatic? Well, according to Shakespeare scholar, English Professor and comic-book fan Jeffrey Kahan, the connection between Batman and the Bard runs much deeper. In his new book, Shakespeare and Superheroes (ARC Humanities Press, 2018), Kahan argues that Shakespeare’s work and the popular superhero comics of the past century are actually engaged in a meaningful dialogue with each other. Rather than simply exploring the influence of Shakespearean drama on the superhero genre or analysing the many comic-book adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, Kahan instead tackles the much more profound question of how these diverse canons engage with broader philosophical and cultural issues. In doing so, he draws highly original parallels between their respective ethical and epistemological stances. Over the course of three chapters, Kahan dissects the shared approach to issues of morality and free will evidenced in Hamlet and CW’s Arrow, analyses the figure of Wonder Woman through the lens of Shakespearean crossdressing, and explores the existential meta-humour of Othello’s Iago and Marvel’s Deadpool. Refusing to adhere to conventional academic hierarchies, Shakespeare and Superheroes provides new insights and fresh perspectives that will appeal equally to scholars of Early Modern literature and twentieth-century popular culture. In a truly fascinating interview, Kahan discusses the thematic parallels between popular comic books and Shakespeare’s plays, the benefits of reading distinct literary works intertextually, and the role of academia in the current political climate. Kahan encourages acts of heroism in daily life on his FB page BE SUPER! Miranda Corcoran received her Ph.D. in 2016 from University College Cork, where she currently teaches American literature. Her research interests include Cold-War literature, genre fiction, literature and psychology, and popular culture. She has published articles on paranoia, literature, and Cold-War popular culture in The Boolean, Americana, and Transverse, and contributed a book chapter on transnational paranoia to the recently published book Atlantic Crossings: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture. She blogs about literature and popular culture HERE and can also be found on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), editors Robert Fink, Melinda Latour, and Zachary Wallmark curate a wide-ranging collection of essays about the function of tone and timbre in popular music. Comprised of four sections focused on genre, voice, instrument, and production, The Relentless Pursuit of Tone engages diverse popular music genres and employs varied theoretical and methodological approaches. The book begins with an ethnographic study about timbre in the 1990s Bay Area rave scene by Cornelia Fales. It concludes with a discussion about timbre in contemporary recording production and electronic dance music by Simon Zagorski-Thomas, along with an afterword by Simon Frith. In between are essays that engage tone in multiple musical genres such as death metal and country, in recording techniques like Auto-Tune and reverb, and through considerations of voice and assorted instruments, including the electric guitar and synthesizer. A companion website with music examples, videos, and images can be accessed here. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. Her book, Fade to Black: Blues Music and the Art of Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press. She is also a music journalist who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Village Voice, Relix, PopMatters, and Hot Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of Neoliberalism (West Virginia University Press, 2018), Tim Jelfs argues that debates about the nature of stuff—its moral valence, its spiritual value, and its status as either “goods” or “garbage”—have been at the heart of American cultural discourse for centuries, and reached a particularly fevered pitch in the 1980s. Bookended by Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech in 1979 and George H. W. Bush’s 1989 inaugural address, both of which lamented the apparent spiritual failings of materialism while at the same time avoiding a full condemnation of the same, Jelfs frames the 1980s as the “Age of Neoliberalism.” This period saw the resurgence of market-based responses to a series of crises, including oil price shocks and inflation. In this context, Jelfs examines texts as wide-ranging as political speeches, films, photography and other visual arts, and novels, using them to explore the particular nuances of American cultural discourse about stuff. Tim Jelfs is Assistant Professor in American Studies at the University of Groningen. His research focuses on interdisciplinary studies of literature, film, art, and more, with particular interest in discussions of materialism in post-1945 American culture. In addition to his current book on “Goods and Garbage,” his next project examines conversations about crisis and narrative culture in the United States from 9/11 to Donald Trump. David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Chapman University, and American Jewish University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

If you watch old movies or study film history, you may know that early 20th-century Hollywood operated under the Motion Picture Production Code, which dictated what could and couldn’t be portrayed onscreen. But did you know that television had a code of its own? Its story has never been told at length until now. Deborah Jaramillo, Associate Professor of Film and Television at Boston University, is the author of a new book called The Television Code: Regulating the Screen to Safeguard the Industry (University of Texas Press, 2018). Jaramillo tells the story of a young television industry’s attempt to police itself on controversial questions about content, fending off pressure from government regulators and finicky viewers. Jaramillo explores whether the federal government could have played a stronger role at this formative time in the industry, and what the code did and didn’t accomplish in its three decades of existence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture