Brill Research Perspectives in Popular Culture – serie

Pop culture emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century as a reaction to the restrictive social traditions of colonial America. It spread quickly and broadly throughout the bustling urban centers of the 1920s—an era when it formed a partnership with technology and the business world. This coalition gave pop culture its identity, allowing it to thrive and form alliances with artistic and literary movements. But pop culture may have run its course with the rise of meme culture. This publication revisits the social, psychic, and aesthetic roots of pop culture, suggesting that meme culture has fragmented its historical flow, thus threatening to bring about its demise.

Shopper’s Paradise: Retail Stores and American Consumer Culture deals with the cultural, social and economic impact of different kinds of retail stores on American society. It has sections on some of the most important retail genres, such as Internet stores (Amazon.com), department stores (Neiman Marcus), coffee shops (Starbucks), big-box stores (Walmart, Costco) and a number of other kinds of stores such as dollar stores, malls, and farmers markets. It also has a discussion of consumer cultures. The subtext in the publication is the notion that shopping is connected with a desire to return to paradise, from which we were excluded due to Adam and Eve’s behavior in the Garden of Eden. Thus, the term “paradise” has two meanings. It is written in an accessible style and makes use of material from a variety of journalists and scholars who write about the retail industry and consumer cultures.

Listen to the podcast about this book.The Joker both fascinates and repels us. From his origin in Detective Comics in 1940, he has committed obscene crimes, some of the worst the Batman universe has ever known, and, conversely, fans have made him the topic of erotic and pornographic “fan fiction.” Speculation about the Joker abounds, where some fans have even claimed that the Joker is “queer coded.” This work explores various popular claims about the Joker, and delves into the history of comic books, and of other popular media from a semiotic viewpoint to understand “The Clown Prince of Crime” in the contexts in which he existed to understand his evolution in the past. From his roots as a “typical hoodlum,” The Joker even starred in his own eponymous comic book series and he was recently featured in a non-canonical movie. This work examines what it is about the Joker which fascinates us.

Mythic Imagination Today is an illustrated guide to the interpenetration of mythology and science throughout the ages. This monograph brings alive our collective need for story to guide the rules, roles, and relationships of everyday life. Whereas mythology is born primarily of perception and imagination, science emerges from systematic observation and experimentation. Both disciplines arise from endless curiosity about the workings of the Universe combined with creative urges to transform inner and outer worlds. Both disciplines are located within open neural wiring that gives rise to uniquely human capacities for learning, memory, and metaphor. Terry Marks-Tarlow explores the origins of story within the social brain; mythmakers and myths from multiple cultures; and how contemporary sciences of chaos and complexity theories and fractal geometry dovetail with ancient wisdom. The ancient Greek myth of Psyche and Eros is unpacked in detail—origins of the very concepts of ‘psyche’ and ‘psychology’.

Written in an accessible style, with many photographs of important tourist sites and drawings by the author, Smooth Sailing provides an ethnographically informed introduction to the nature of tourism and an important aspect of tourism, ocean cruising. The bookdiscusses topics such as the nature of tourism, different kinds of tourists, the role that myths play in tourism, gratifications from tourism, and travel as a means of personal transformation. It also deals with ocean cruising and considers the notion that cruises are boring, social class and cruising, cruising and addiction, and cruising and the psyche.

Historically Judaism has been called both a nation and a religion, yet there are those Jews who eschew the religious and national definitions for a cultural one. For example, while TV’s Mrs. Maisel is ostensibly a Jew, the actor playing her is not, and Mrs. Maisel’s actions are not always Jewish. In The Fractured Jew Joel West separates Judaism into phenomenological and performative, starting with popular portrayals of Jews and Judaism, in today’s media, as a jumping-off point to understand Judaism and Jewishness, not from the outside, but from the emic, internal, Jewish point of view.

Fashion is an integral part of popular culture, closely intertwined with tales, magazines, photography, cinema, television, music and sports...up to the emergence of dedicated exhibitions and museums. Fashion is undergoing a major digital transformation: garments and apparels are presented and sold online, and fashion trends and styles are launched, discussed and negotiated mainly in the digital arena. While going well beyond national and linguistic borders, digital fashion communication requires further cultural sensitivity: otherwise, it might ignite inter-cultural misunderstandings and communication crises. This book presents the recent transformation of fashion from being a Cinderella to becoming a major cultural attractor and academic research subject, as well as the implications of its digital transformation. Through several cases, it documents intercultural communication crises and provides strategies to interpret and prevent them.

The presidency of Donald J. Trump, has had a considerable impacts on American politics and society. One of these was his altering of the comedic mood in America, taking comedy away from many of its traditions. His presidency turned comedy into political weaponry, as comedians on the liberal side of politics turned their efforts to ridiculing Trump’s buffoonish persona, while on the conservative side, a Trump-supportive group of comedians mocked those very comedians who opposed Trump. Trump himself emerged as a comedian, performing his dark, caustic, comical routines with consummate skill at his rallies. If comedy is a pulse for a country, then it is legitimate to ask if that pulse still beating, even after Trump lost reelection in 2020. This book will address this question, examining how Trump’s presidency interrupted the historical flow of American comedic traditions, and how it spread a dark mood throughout American society.

Sports Semiotics applies semiotics (and other disciplines, secondarily) to analyse the social, cultural, economic and psychological significance of sports. It includes a primer on semiotic theory, sections on the analysis of wrestling by Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies, as well as sections on football and the sacred, the Super Bowl, and the semiotics of televised baseball.

This book offers a comprehensive and accessible characterisation of the first-person shooter videogame genre. After providing an overview of the history of the first-person shooter videogame genre, Alberto Oya comments on the various defining peculiarities of this genre, namely the first-person perspective, the shooting gaming mechanics, the heroic in-game narrative or background story, and multiplayer gaming. Oya also argues that educators can use first-person shooter videogames to encourage their students to reflect on historical and philosophical issues.

Since the late 19th century, the stock characters of the commedia dell'arte, especially Harlequin, Pulcinella and Pierrot, have been making frequent appearances in the world of material and cultural artifacts, in such categories as the entertainment industry, the food market, politics and education. This book explores the manner in which commedia dell'arte characters and narratives have been instrumentalized to serve commodity marketing, political critique, the arts and cultural pedagogy. Some embodiments of commedia dell'arte demonstrate an extraordinary capacity for serious reflection, reaching out, from within the heart of popular culture, to aesthetic ideals and cognitive depth of a remarkable degree.

A boutique, a cruise ship, a museum and a hotel all have something in common. But what? They are all places of consumption—not just in the narrow economic sense, but also as part of a broader cultural, emotional, and symbolic phenomenon.Drawing on a semiotic approach, this book explores how designed environments from foodscapes to memorials convey meanings and guide everyday rituals, helping us to understand how space works as a language that structures practices, communicates values, and expresses identities. If you're curious about how places work, why they affect us, and what they say, this book gives you the tools to decode them.

Seeds asks what must already be in place for thought, perception, and relation to begin. You enter a modular and recursive text built from signals, fragments, and Morse-based structures, where rhythm and interval operate as temporal engines and silence functions as condition rather than absence. Instead of narrating experience, Seeds records executed forms—pulses, delays, repetitions—so meaning appears as a late arrival rather than a foundation. The book foregrounds emergence without origin, growth without teleology, and coherence without hierarchy, offering a media-archaeological poetics of structure that can be entered anywhere and revisited without closure.

Which comic book characters with cinematic themes appeared in Italian comics of the 1930s and 1940s? How did cinema intersect with adventure and humorous comics? Was cinema merely a side dish or a true protagonist? This book attempts to answer these questions by analyzing the long and original history of the relationship between cinema and Italian comics. Indeed, between the 1930s and 1940s, a veritable publishing boom developed, with many comic book characters pursuing film careers. This book explores the reasons behind this remarkable cultural phenomenon.