The mass media make it possible for fame to be enhanced and transformed posthumously. What does it mean to fans when a celebrity dies, and how can death change the way that celebrities are perceived and celebrated? How do we mourn and remember? What can different forms of communication reveal about the role of media in our lives? Through a provocative look at the lives and legacy of popular musicians from Elvis to Tupac and from Louis Prima to John Lennon, Afterlife as Afterimage analyzes the process of posthumous fame to give us new insights into the consequences of mediation, and it illuminates the complex nature of fandom, community formation, and identity construction.
A Dictionary of Hallucinations is designed to serve as a reference manual for neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychiatric residents, psychologists, neurologists, historians of psychiatry, general practitioners, and academics dealing professionally with concepts of hallucinations and other sensory deceptions.
The untimely deaths of Amy Winehouse (2011) and Whitney Houston (2012), and the ’resurrection’ of Tupac Shakur for a performance at the Coachella music festival in April 2012, have focused the media spotlight on the relationship between popular music, fame and death. If the phrase ’sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ ever qualified a lifestyle, it has left many casualties in its wake, and with the ranks of dead musicians growing over time, so the types of death involved and the reactions to them have diversified. Conversely, as many artists who fronted the rock’n’roll revolution of the 1950s and 1960s continue to age, the idea of dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse (which gave rise, for instance, to the myth of the ’27 Club’) no longer carries the same resonance that it once might have done. This edited collection explores the reception of dead rock stars, ’rock’ being taken in the widest sense as the artists discussed belong to the genres of rock’n’roll (Elvis Presley), disco (Donna Summer), pop and pop-rock (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse), punk and post-punk (GG Allin, Ian Curtis), rap (Tupac Shakur), folk (the Dutchman André Hazes) and ’world’ music (Fela Kuti). When music artists die, their fellow musicians, producers, fans and the media react differently, and this book brings together their intertwining modalities of reception. The commercial impact of death on record sales, copyrights, and print media is considered, and the different justifications by living artists for being involved with the dead, through covers, sampling and tributes. The cultural representation of dead singers is investigated through obituaries, biographies and biopics, observing that posthumous fame provides coping mechanisms for fans, and consumers of popular culture more generally, to deal with the knowledge of their own mortality. Examining the contrasting ways in which male and female dead singers are portrayed in the media, the book
In this fascinating book, Steve Skiena and Charles Ward bring quantitative analysis to bear on ranking and comparing historical reputations by aggregating the traces of millions of opinions, just as Google ranks webpages. They present rankings of more than one thousand of history's most significant people in science, politics, entertainment, and all areas of human endeavor.
The Sound Studies Reader is a groundbreaking anthology blending recent work that self-consciously describes itself as 'sound studies' with earlier and lesser known scholarship on sound.
The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) has been labeled the very icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. Seeing Double reconsiders this iconic literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life. In doing so, it revises some of our most common assumptions about the unresolved tensions that emerged in Baudelaire’s writing during a time of political and social upheaval. Françoise Meltzer argues that Baudelaire did not simply describe the contradictions of modernity; instead, his work embodied and recorded them, leaving them unresolved and often less than comprehensible. Baudelaire’s penchant for looking simultaneously backward to an idealized past and forward to an anxious future, while suspending the tension between them, is part of what Meltzer calls his “double vision”—a way of seeing that produces encounters that are doomed to fail, poems that can’t advance, and communications that always seem to falter. In looking again at the poet and his work, Seeing Double helps to us to understand the prodigious transformations at stake in the writing of modern life.
This interdisciplinary collection focuses on recent adaptations, both experimental and popular, that put hybridity, transtextuality, and transmediality at play. It reframes adaptation in terms of the transmedia concept of "world-building," which accurately captures the complexity and multidirectionality of contemporary scattered and ubiquitous practices of adaptation. The Editors argue that the process of moving stories or their elements across different media platforms and repurposing them for new uses results in the production of hybrid transtextualities. The book demonstrate how hybrid textualities augment narrative and literary forms as goals of their world-building, finding unexpected sites of cross-pollination, expansion, and appropriation in spoken-word and dance performance, (auto)biographical comics, advertising, Chinese Kun opera, and popular song lyrics. This yoking of hybridity and transmediality yields not only diversified and often commercialized aesthetic forms but also enables the emergence a unique cultural space in-between, a mezzaterra capable of addressing current political issues and mobilizing broader audiences
Woven from dreamlike and echoing images, After Image travels between life and death, between a living body and its absence. A house, an orchard, “a shudder of blossoms.” A fountain, a bed, a sudden spring snow. Carefully woven from a dreamlike set of images which echo and reconfigure throughout the collection, the poems in Jenny George’s After Image hug the cusp between life and death, between a living body and its absence. “And in the space / left behind—” Time slips. Eurydice muses on the gestures of the living, and we look out from inside the removed head of Orpheus. The laughing gods and the furies make appearances too, and the poet’s persona appears as its own character—the observing self, navigating the strangenesses of grief’s terrain. Unsentimental yet pulsing with love, each cutting and transcendent poem is relentless in its willingness to see, to hold both the impossibility and inevitability of transformation. In scenes that hover between the ordinary, the imagined, and the unknowable, and with George’s sly, meticulous simplicity, After Image asks what lingers in the face of death and what falls away.
This study explores Chaucer's present-day cultural reputation by way of popular culture. In just the past two decades his texts have been adapted to a wide variety of popular genres, including television, stage, comic book, hip-hop, science fiction, horror, romance, and crime fiction. This cultural recycling involves a variety of functions but Chaucer's primary association is with the idea of pilgrimage and the prevailing tenor is populist satire. The target is not only cultural elitism but also the dominant discourse of professional Chaucerians. Academics in turn may have doubts about the value of popular Chaucer; popular culture theory, however, would maintain that such skepticism has less to do with critical discrimination than the assertion of social distinction. Nonetheless, the fact that Chaucer has a popular afterlife, and remains an ideological product over which competing groups lay claim, attests to his current cultural vitality.
