fiske understanding popular culture

This revised edition of a now classic text includes a new introduction by Henry Jenkins, explaining ‘Why Fiske Still Matters’ for today’s students, followed by a discussion between former Fiske students Kevin Glynn, Jonathan Gray, and Pamela Wilson on the theme of ‘Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular’. Both underline the continuing relevance of this foundational text in the study of popular culture.

What is popular culture? How does it differ from mass culture? And what do popular "texts" reveal about class, race, and gender dynamics in a society? John Fiske answers these and a host of other questions in Understanding Popular Culture.

When it was first written, Understanding Popular Culture took a groundbreaking approach to studying such cultural artifacts as jeans, shopping malls, tabloid newspapers, and TV game shows, which remains relevant today. Fiske differentiates between mass culture – the cultural "products" put out by an industrialized, capitalist society – and popular culture – the ways in which people use, abuse, and subvert these products to create their own meanings and messages. Rather than focusing on mass culture’s attempts to dominate and homogenize, he prefers to look at (and revel in) popular culture’s evasions and manipulations of these attempts.

Designed as a companion to Reading the Popular, Understanding Popular Culture presents a radically different theory of what it means for culture to be popular: that it is, literally, of the people. It is not imposed on them, it is created by them, and its pleasures and meanings reflect popular tastes and concerns – and a rejection of those fostered by mass culture. With wit, clarity, and insight, Professor Fiske debunks the myth of the mindless mass audience, and demonstrates that, in myriad ways, popular culture thrives because that audience is more aware than anyone guesses.

This revised edition of a now classic text includes a new introduction by Henry Jenkins, explaining ‘Why Fiske Still Matters’ for today’s students, followed by a discussion between former Fiske students Ron Becker, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Steve Classen, Elana Levine, Jason Mittell, Greg Smith and Pam Wilson on ‘John Fiske and Television Culture’. Both underline the continuing relevance of this foundational text in the study of contemporary media and popular culture.

Television is unique in its ability to produce so much pleasure and so many meanings for such a wide variety of people. In this book, John Fiske looks at television’s role as an agent of popular culture, and goes on to consider the relationship between this cultural dimension and television’s status as a commodity of the cultural industries that are deeply inscribed with capitalism. He makes use of detailed textual analysis and audience studies to show how television is absorbed into social experience, and thus made into popular culture. Audiences, Fiske argues, are productive, discriminating, and televisually literate.

Television Culture provides a comprehensive introduction for students to an integral topic on all communication and media studies courses.

Exploring poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives, and Hallmark greeting cards, among other unconventional sources, Mike Chasar casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers. He shows how American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century and its reception helped set the stage for the dynamics of popular culture and mass media today.

Poetry was then part and parcel of American popular culture, spreading rapidly as the consumer economy expanded and companies exploited its profit-making potential. Poetry also offered ordinary Americans creative, emotional, political, and intellectual modes of expression, whether through scrapbooking, participation in radio programs, or poetry contests. Reenvisioning the uses of twentieth-century poetry, Chasar provides a richer understanding of the innovations of modernist and avant-garde poets and the American reading public's sophisticated powers of feeling and perception.

New to this edition: Extensively revised, rewritten, and updated; Improved and expanded content throughout including a new chapter on psychoanalysis and a new section on post-Marxism and the global postmodern; Closer explicit links to the new edition companion reader Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader; More illustrative diagrams and images; Fully revised, improved, and updated companion web site.

Ideal for courses in: cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, sociology of culture, popular culture, visual studies, cultural criticism.

This revised edition of a now classic text includes a new introduction by Henry Jenkins, explaining ‘Why Fiske Still Matters’ for today’s students, followed by a discussion between former Fiske students Ron Becker, Elana Levine, Darrell Newton and Pamela Wilson on the theme of ‘Structuralism and Semiotics, Fiske-Style’. Both underline the continuing relevance of this foundational text in communication studies.

How can we study communication? What are the main theories and methods of approach?

This classic text provides a lucid, accessible introduction to the main authorities in the field of communication studies, aimed at students coming to the subject for the first time. It outlines a range of methods of analysing examples of communication, and describes the theories underpinning them. Thus armed, the reader will be able to tease out the latent cultural meanings in such apparently simple communications as news photos or popular TV programmes, and to see them with new eyes.