Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media
Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media

Author: Jennifer Burek Pierce

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2020-11-15

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1609387198

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For decades, we’ve been warned that video killed the radio star, and, more recently, that social media has replaced reading. Nerdfighteria, a first-of-its-kind online literary community with nearly three million members, challenges these assumptions. It is the brainchild of brothers Hank and John Green, who provide literary themed programming on their website and YouTube channel, including video clips from John, a best-selling author most famous for his young adult book, The Fault in Our Stars. These clips not only give fans personal insights into his works and the writing process writ large, they also provide unique access to the author, inspiring fans to create their own fan art and make connections with one another. In the twenty-first century, reading and watching videos are related activities that allow people to engage with authors and other readers. Whether they turn to The Fault in Our Stars or titles by lesser-known authors, Nerdfighters are readers. Incorporating thousands of testimonials about what they read and why, Jennifer Burek Pierce not only sheds light on this particular online community, she also reveals what it tells us about the changing nature of reading in the digital age. In Nerdfighteria, we find a community who shows us that being online doesn’t mean disinterest in books.

The Book of Famous Iowans
The Book of Famous Iowans

Author: Douglas Bauer

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2014-11

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1609382668

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Will Vaughn, a man of late middle age living in Chicago with his second wife, remembers the month of June 1957 in his hometown, the rural village of New Holland, Iowa. More precisely, Will remembers just a few days of that month and the quick sequence of astonishing events that have colored, ever since, the logic of his heart and the moods of his mind. He tells of his stunningly beautiful young mother, Leanne, who liked to recall the years of the Second World War, during which she sang with a dance band in a lounge in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He tells too of his father, Lewis, a soldier in the war who one night saw the “resplendently sequined” Leanne step onstage and began at that instant to plot his courtship of her. But mostly what Will summons up in his intimate remembrance are those few catastrophic days in early June when he was “three months shy of twelve,” more than a decade after his parents have married and returned to the Vaughns’ home place, where Lewis farms his family’s land. For it is during those days that Leanne’s affair with a local man named Bobby Markum becomes known—first to Lewis and then, in a fiercely dramatic public confrontation, to young Will, to his beloved Grandmother Vaughn, and by nightfall to all the citizens of the town. The knowledge of such scandal, in so small a place, sets off a series of highly charged reactions, vivid consequences that surely determine the fates of every member of this unforgettable family. A tale of memory and hero worship and the restless pulse of longing, The Book of Famous Iowans examines those forces that define not only a state made up of a physical geography, but more important, those states of the wholly human spirit.

The Book of Jane
The Book of Jane

Author: Jennifer Habel

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2020-04-01

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 1609387074

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The Book of Jane is a perceptive, tenacious investigation of gender, authority, and art. Jennifer Habel draws a contrast between the archetype of the lone male genius and the circumscribed, relational lives of women. Habel points repeatedly to discrepancies of scale: the grand arenas of Balanchine, Einstein, and Matisse are set against the female miniature—the dancer’s stockings, the anonymous needlepoint, the diary entry, the inventory of a purse.

Carnival in the Countryside
Carnival in the Countryside

Author: Chris Rasmussen

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2015-08-15

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1609383575

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More than a century and a half after its founding, the Iowa State Fair is the state's central institution, event, and symbol. During its annual run each August, the fair attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors who make the pilgrimage to the fairground to see the iconic butter cow, to ride the Old Mill, to walk through the livestock barns, and to people-watch. At the same time that they enjoy fried candy bars and roller coasters, Iowans also compete to raise the best corn and zucchinis, to make the best jams and jellies, to rear the finest sheep and goats, the largest cattle and hogs, and the handsomest horses. This tension between entertainment and agriculture goes back all the way to the fair's founding in the mid-1800s, as historian Chris Rasmussen shows in this thought-provoking history. The fair's founders had lofty aims: they sought to improve agriculture and foster a distinctively democratic American civilization. But from the start these noble intentions jostled up against people's desire to have fun and make money, honestly or otherwise--not least because the fair had to pay for itself. In short, the Iowa State Fair has as much to tell us about human nature and American history as it does about growing corn.

Johnny Cash International
Johnny Cash International

Author: Michael Hinds

Publisher: Fandom & Culture

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1609387015

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"How the world shows it loves Johnny Cash:: a Brazilian records "Hurt" and posts it to YouTube;an elderly shopkeeper in Northern Ireland plays Johnny Cash every day on his tape recorder ; a young man in Tomb, a farm town in southern Norway, sports a Johnny Cash tattoo; a woman in the Netherlands maintains the Johnny Cash Infocenter, an exhaustive resource of Johnny Cash materials worldwide--and gets to wear June Carter's clothing and sleep in Johnny Cash's bedroom. One might have suspected that Johnny Cash's appeal was universal, given his nonstop touring schedule for more than 40 years. But the breadth-and nuance-of his appeal worldwide is stunning, as is the way in which his fans have sought both to further that appeal as well as protect his legacy. International Cash: How the World Loves the Man in Black explores the nature of Johnny Cash's appeal worldwide from the fan perspective, explaining what the worldwide love of the artist tells us about him, the world, the United States, and the nature of fandom. It's also a series of stories about technology and authenticity, as a world easily navigated by the Internet is also one that conceives authenticity as a type of commodity easily displayed. Different eras of technology have also produced different fan behaviours and activities, and they are represented in continuity with one another here. There are Cash superfans who travel extensively to trail Cash's life and perform in homage to him, but there is also another population of Cash fans who express themselves more discreetly, often online. There they are often expressing their love for Cash in uncertain spaces, forums where there are no guarantees that everyone feels the same way as themselves. Here Cash is seen as somebody not only worth admiring, but worth fighting for, and this book shows that Cash fandom is a more active field of politics and commitment than might routinely be assumed"--

The Book of a Hundred Hands
The Book of a Hundred Hands

Author: Cole Swensen

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2005-04

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 1587296470

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The hand is second only to language in defining the human being, and its constant presence makes it a ready reminder of our humanity, with all its privileges and obligations. In this dazzling collection, Cole Swensen explores the hand from any angle approachable by language and art. Her hope: to exhaust the hand as subject matter; her joy: the fact that she couldn’t. These short poems reveal the hand from a hundred different perspectives. Incorporating sign language, drawing manuals, paintings from the 14th to the 20th century, shadow puppets, imagined histories, positions (the “hand as a boatless sail”), and professions (“the hand as window in which the panes infinitesimal”), Cole Swensen’s fine hand is “that which augments” our understanding and appreciation of “this freak wing,” this “wheel that comforts none” yet remains “a fruit the size and shape of the heart.”