Narrative and Genre introduces students to these key concepts in media studies, complementing Image and Representation published in 1998. It covers the major narrative theorists including Todorov, Propp, Levi-Strauss, Barthes and applies their ideas via case examples ranging from The X Files to newspaper reporting. It then moves on to offer an extensive analysis of the basic schema and conventions of genre, drawing on the film noir, the TV cop genre and science fiction for examples, and showing how the repertoire of elements of each ranges across setting, character, narrative, iconography, style and stars. Fresh, down-to-earth and well-structured, this is an excellent text for all those in post-16 education, whether in school, college or university.

For decades, Germany has been shaped and reshaped by the sounds of popular music-whether viewed as uniquely German or an ideological invader from abroad. This collected volume brings together leading figures in the field of German Studies, popular music studies, and cultural studies at large to survey the sociopolitical impact of music on conceptions of the German state and national identity, gender and sexuality, and transnational cultural production and consumption, expanding on the ways in which sounds, technologies, media practices, and exchanges of popular music provide a unique glimpse into the cultural dynamics of postwar Germany.

Why do we still read and discuss Chaucer? The answer may be simple: he is fun, and he challenges our intelligence and questions our certainties. This collected volume represents an homage to a toweringly great poet, as well as an acknowledgement of the intellectual excitement, challenges, and pleasure that readers owe to him as even today, his poems have the capacity to change the way we engage with fundamental questions of knowledge, understanding, and beauty.

What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is segregated to one that is integrated - from global to planetary; from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side. In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue from Edouard Glissant's vision of multilingualism and reignites the myth of the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant. Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation. By combining the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space - an astro-culture - in which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation, media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come.

An intellectual history of contrasting ideas around the power of the arts to bring about personal and societal change - for better and worse. A fascinating account of the value and functions of the arts in society, in both the private sphere of individual emotions and self-development and public sphere of politics and social distinction.

Although journalism has always been an important vehicle of collective memory, it has been neglected in discussions about how memory works. This fascinating book aims to correct that disjuncture, by tracking the ways in which journalism and shared memory mutually support, undermine, repair and challenge each other. How is journalism's address to memory different from that of other institutions? What would the study of memory look like without journalism? And how would our understanding of journalism fall short without paying attention to memory? Bringing together leading scholars in journalism and memory studies, this collection makes explicit the longstanding and complicated role that journalism has played in keeping the past alive. From anniversary issues and media retrospectives to simple verbal and visual analogies connecting past and present, journalism incorporates an address to earlier times across the wide array of its conventions and practices. How it does so and which triumphs and problems ensue in our understanding of collective memory constitute the charter of this volume.

The idea of one's memory "filling up" is a humorous misconception of how memory in general is thought to work; it is actually has no capacity limit. However, the idea of a "full brain" makes more sense with reference to working memory, which is the limited amount of information a person can hold temporarily in an especially accessible form for use in the completion of almost any challenging cognitive task. This groundbreaking book explains the evidence supporting Cowan's theoretical proposal about working memory capacity, and compares it to competing perspectives. Cognitive psychologists profoundly disagree on how working memory is limited: whether by the number of units that can be retained (and, if so, what kind of units and how many?), the types of interfering material, the time that has elapsed, some combination of these mechanisms, or none of them. The book assesses these hypotheses and examines explanations of why capacity limits occur, including vivid biological, cognitive, and evolutionary accounts. The book concludes with a discussion of the practical importance of capacity limits in daily life. Incorporating the latest from the recent surge in research into working memory capacity limits and the remarkable new insights provided by neuroimaging techniques, this book serves as an invaluable resource for all memory researchers and is accessible to a wide range of readers.

The book showcases research on digital entertainment solutions in different sectors. In recent years, digital media have evolved to include bandwidth-rich, smart, and connected platforms accessed via computers, tablets, smart phones, social media, and video game consoles. The high connectivity and vast processing capacity of these platforms have allowed for platform-agnostic, streaming, always-on, entertainment-on-demand consumption of digital content in a way distinct from traditional models of entertainment consumption. Moving beyond the unilateral delivery of content, with fixed positions of the entertainers and the entertained, digital entertainment is now dynamically generated by users and providers, blurring the boundary between producers and consumers of entertainment. With the increasing accessibility of multimodal media that surround audiences with sensory-rich information, digital entertainment is becoming more immersive.

'Media and Nostalgia' is an interdisciplinary and international exploration of media and their relation to nostalgia. Each chapter demonstrates how nostalgia has always been a media-related matter, studying also the recent nostalgia boom by analysing, among others, digital photography, television series and home videos.

Spracklen explores the impact of the internet on leisure and leisure studies, examining the ways in which digital leisure spaces and activities have become part of everyday leisure. Covering a range of issues from social media and file-sharing to romance on the Internet, this book presents new theoretical directions for digital leisure.

We live in a world that is increasingly characterised as full of risk, danger and threat. Every day a new social issue emerges to assail our sensibilities and consciences. Drawing on the popular Economic Social and Research Council (ESRC) seminar series, this book examines these social issues and anxieties, and the solutions to them, through the concept of moral panic. With a commentary by Charles Critcher and contributions from both well-known and up-and-coming researchers and practitioners, this is a stimulating and innovative overview of moral panic ideas, which will be an essential resource.

This collection of essays considers the ways in which feminism is still an important issue in twenty-first century society. Looking at various forms of literature, media, and popular culture, the book establishes that contemporary images of femininity are highly contested, complex, and frequently problematic.

The first in-depth study of David Bowie’s music videos across a sustained period takes on interweaving storyworlds of an iconic career. Remarkable for their capacity to conjure elaborate imagery, Bowie’s videos provide fascinating exemplars of the artistry and remediation of music video. When their construction is examined across several years, they appear as time-travelling vessels, transporting kooky characters and strange story-world components across time and space. By charting Bowie’s creative and collaborative process across five distinct phases, David Bowie and the Art of Music Video shows how he played a vital role in establishing music video as an artform. Filling a gap in the existing literature, this book shines a light on the significant contributions of directors such as Mick Rock, Stanley Dorfman and David Mallet, each of whom taught Bowie much about how to use the form. By examining Bowie's collaborative process, his use of surrealist strategies and his integration of avant-garde art with popular music and media, the book provides a history of music video in relation to the broader fields of audiovisual media, visual music and art.

This book brings specialists in religious studies, African-American studies, history, and political science, together with a media librarian to examine violence as it is presented in films and how instructors can use films to teach about violence. The object of inquiry is the vulnerability of socially oppressed people to physical violence and to institutionalized patterns of discrimination, herein termed structural violence. The susceptibility of women to violence provides an example that is discussed in detail, revealing both merits and weaknesses in film treatment of gender. The full effect of violence is considered, from the abuse of the individual to the wartime mobilization of entire societies. Chapters also look at the benefits and problems of using films in the classroom and provide resources helpful to instructors, such as sample discussion and study guides, a bibliography, and a filmography.

Signals in the Air: Native Broadcasting in America is the first book-length study of one of the most unique communications enterprises in U.S. history. It is the remarkable account of how the nation's most exploited minority group overcame adversity by embracing the airwaves. Through their own radio and television stations, American Indians have found a way to keep their cultures and languages from perishing. This book examines the impetus behind the development of Native-run stations and how these stations operate today. It assesses the influence and impact of Native broadcasts in the indigenous community and seeks to chronicle the formidable challenges confronting Indian broadcasters as they provide vital programming services to the often impoverished inhabitants of the nation's remote reservations.

In 2000, for the first time in American political history, four former presidents were still alive after serving in the White House. This book critically and systematically examines press coverage of these four ex-presidents for three years after they left office. Through content analysis, the volume draws together the tone and major themes in press coverage of stories about Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. Bush. The study serves as a useful historic document, depicting the private lives of these former presidents from both parties as seen through the American press. The book is a unique examination of the relationship between ex-presidents and the press.

Examining the nature and scope of the relationship between the press and ex-presidents, the study assumes that although they are out of office and thus out of the limelight, ex-presidents still have powerful influence domestically and internationally. That influence makes it valuable to know how, and with what intensity, the press covers ex-presidents. This volume documents their post-White House careers through the prism of the press, enriching our understanding of life after the presidency.

This book provides new theoretical approaches to the subject of virtuality. All chapters reflect the importance of extending the analysis of the concept of "the virtual" to areas of knowledge that, until today, have not been fully included in its philosophical foundations. The respective chapters share new insights on art, media, psychic systems and technology, while also presenting new ways of articulating the concept of the virtual with regard to the main premises of Western thought. Given its thematic scope, this book is intended not only for a philosophical audience, but also for all scientists who have turned to the humanities in search of answers to their questions.

Spanish comics represent an exciting and diverse field, yet one that is often overlooked outside of Spain. Spanish Comics offers an overview on contemporary scholarship on Spanish comics, focusing on a wide range of comics dating from the Francoist dictatorship, 1939-1975; the Political Transition, 1970-1985; and Democratic Spain since the early 1980s including the emergence of the graphic novel in 2000. Touching on themes of memory, gender, regional identities, and history, the chapters in this collection demonstrate the historical and cultural significance of Spanish comics.

Bringing together the voices of scholars from Europe and North America with those of key contest stakeholders, Performing the 'New' Europe: Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest argues that this popular music competition is a symbolic contact zone between European cultures: an arena for European identification in which both national solidarity and participation in a European identity are confirmed, and a site where cultural struggles over the meanings, frontiers and limits of Europe are enacted. This exciting collection explores the ways in which European artists perform, disavow, and contest their racial, national, and sexual identities in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), and asks difficult questions about European inclusions and exclusions the contest reflects. It suggests the ESC as an ever-evolving network of peoples and places transcending both historical and geographical boundaries of Europe that brings into being new understandings of the relationship between culture, space, and identities.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the 80s and 90s; the pervasive availability of recycled computer hardware; the global dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium: all these have revolutionised the access of previously marginalised populations to the cultural flows of global modernity. Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local.

"This set of 18 essays offers a variety of interesting commentaries a 'progressive forum' on the Clinton sex scandal. . . . The collection includes (in part) ruminations on body imagery, the idea of 'the Jewess, ' the association of sexual recklessness with notions of race and class, the peculiarities of Clinton's politics (as well as his personal behavior) that made him vulnerable to such an attack, and the implications for Clinton's (reluctant) feminist supporters."
--"Library Journal"

"The book contains more than its share of smart writing"
--"Salon.com"

Alongside the O.J. Simpson trial, the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky now stands as the seminal cultural event of the 90s. Alternatively transfixed and repelled by this sexual scandal, confusion still reigns over its meanings and implications. How are we to make sense of a tale that is often wild and bizarre, yet replete with serious political and cultural implications?

Our Monica, Ourselves provides a forum for thinking through the cultural, political, and public policy issues raised by the investigation, publicity, and Congressional impeachment proceedings surrounding the affair. It pulls this spectacle out of the framework provided by the conventions of the corporate news media, with its particular notions of what constitutes a newsworthy event. Drawing from a broad range of scholars, Our Monica, Ourselves considers Monica Lewinsky's Jewishness, Linda Tripp's face, the President's penis, the role of shame in public discourse, and what it's like to have sex as the president, as well as specific legal and historical issues at stake in the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Thoughtful but accessible, immediate yet far reaching, Our Monica, Ourselves will change the way we think about the Clinton affair, while helping us reimagine culture and politics writ large.

Contributors include: Lauren Berlant, Eric O. Clarke, Ann Cvetkovich, Simone Weil Davis, Lisa Duggan, Jane Gallop, Marjorie Garber, Janet R. Jakobsen, James R. Kincaid, Laura Kipnis, Tomasz Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowicz, Joe Lockard, Catharine Lumby, Toby Miller, Dana D. Nelson, Anna Marie Smith, Ellen Willis, and Eli Zaretsky.

Digital Broadcasting presents an introduction to how the classic notion of 'broadcasting' has evolved and is being reinterpreted in an age of digitization and convergence. The book argues that 'digital broadcasting' is not a contradiction in terms, but-on the contrary-both terms presuppose and need each other. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary and international field of research and theory, it looks at current developments in television and radio broadcasting on the level of regulation and policy, industries and economics, production and content, and audience and consumption practices.

- Consistently examines the business of media through the paradigm of production-distribution-exhibition in a way that no other book does, giving students a more thorough understanding of how media industries work and the vocabulary they need to talk about them. - Engagingly written with examples that are familiar to students, helping them better connect to the content and understand their role as media consumers and producers. - Coverage of convergence and its impact is incorporated into every chapter. - A range of pedagogical materials in the print book and online help students become savvy media consumers and producers, including historical timelines of each media industry; media literacy questions that develop students' critical thinking skills; case studies that bring theory to life; and study aids including flashcards and practice quizzes.