This thesis analyses the content, tone, form and authorship of the national newspaper gossip column 1918-1939, as a new means through which the qualities of the popular press in this period can be more closely defined. Often dismissed as an example of the sensational, Americanization of early twentieth-century popular culture, the celebrity gossip column has been loosely grouped with the friendly, informal language and bolder formatting of the ‘New Journalism’ of the late nineteenth century and the development of the dramatic ‘human-interest’ stories of ‘everyday life’ in the interwar period (LeMahieu, 1988; Wiener, 1988). Through a comparative study of six newspapers including the Daily Express, Daily Mail and News of the World, I analyse the changing representation of the celebrity subject, and, originally, the shifting character and persona of the gossip columnist. Whereas some historians have analysed the content of newspapers without considering the questions of the newspaper’s production, I analyse newspaper employment records, gossip columnists’ memoirs and their unpublished letters and diaries to define the specific economic, social and cultural circumstances which, I argue, influenced their public portrayal. Also, in examining the unpublished correspondence between editors, proprietors and columnists and the burgeoning print culture of journalistic training manuals and professional memoirs, I provide a history of the press’s professionalization in this period. The national popular press has often been used as a historical source to define national character and national identity in the interwar period (Bland, 2008; Kohn, 1992). By scrutinizing the content and production of the gossip column and particularly the class, behaviour, interactions and subject matter of the columnist, I argue that the gossip column presented a version of ‘Britishness’ that was not so inward-looking and domesticated as so many accounts of interwar Britain suggest.

The topic of my thesis focuses on the phenomenon of popular music in the area of Central Europe, which in the 20th century had been characterized by the presence of the ruling Communist ideology. The work will be based primarily on popular music and its changes in the 70s and 80s of 20th century in Hungary. The issue will be approached from cultural- historical perspective and its focus will be tension between the official cultural program and the need to respond to the requirements of the recipient at the time. Basic structure consists of the situation in Hungary, which will be compared to the situation in Czechoslovakia, there will be outlined the main common points that have an impact on Central European culture and politics, as well as the specifics of the Hungarian situation. Also the relation to the export of Hungarian popular music abroad will be mentioned.

Esta dissertação tem o objetivo de investigar o cinema de propaganda política produzido por duas associações de caráter ideológico, entre os anos 1961 e 1964: o Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais (Ipês), dirigido principalmente por ricos empresários liberais e anticomunistas; e o Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC da UNE), constituído por jovens artistas influenciados pelas idéias marxistas. Para tanto, busquei articular informações provenientes da análise intrínseca de seus filmes com as do contexto histórico em que foram feitos e exibidos e, em especial, as extraídas da documentação a que tive acesso, com o intuito, então, de compreender os modelos cinematográficos aos quais essas obras se alinharam. Ao estudar como ipesianos e cepecistas foram adversários em meio às instabilidades de um Brasil próximo ao Golpe de 1964, foi possível constatar como os dois grupos financiaram a atividade cinematográfica com a expectativa de intervir nos rumos socioeconômicos e culturais do país a partir de projetos conflitantes que, por um lado, pretendiam fortalecer o poder da elite com um capitalismo de base liberal e, por outro, romper com as estruturas de poder capitalistas. Nesse sentido, mesmo com essas divergências, a pesquisa demonstra como ambos utilizaram um discurso próximo em suas filmografias, repleto de similaridades, que se manifesta no uso de técnicas e linguagens idênticas, como é o caso das experiências estéticas didáticas e das representações do povo com a finalidade de concretizar um programa ideológico para a nação. Assim, esse mestrado procura defender a hipótese de que, mesmo politicamente opositores, Ipês e CPC manusearam um referencial cinematográfico com diversas semelhanças. / The present dissertation aims the investigation of the political propaganda film industry production between 1961 and 1964 by two ideological character associations: the Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais Ipês (Research and Social Studies Institute), managed especially by liberal and anticommunist rich businessmen; and the Centro Popular de Cultura CPC da UNE (Culture Popular Center), constituted of young artists influenced by marxist ideas. And to do so, I tried to join information provided by the intrinsic analysis of their films and the historic context in which they were produced and released and, especially, the information taken from the documentation I had access to, with the purpose of understanding the cinematographic models to which these films attached. By studying how ipesianos (term used to refer to the members of Ipês) and cepecistas (term used to refer to the members of CPC) were opponents in the instable Brazil near the 1964 coup detat, it was possible to observe how both groups financed their cinematographic activity, expecting to exercise some influence on the country cultural and socioeconomic course, by producing conflicting projects intended to, on the one hand, strengthen the power elite by supporting liberal based capitalism, and on the other hand, bring the capitalist power structures to an end. Nevertheless, even showing divergences, this research makes evident how both groups made use of analogue methodology on their filmographies, full of similarities, expressed in their identical techniques and languages, which can be seen in their didactical esthetic experiences and representations of the people with the purpose of concretize an ideological program for the nation. Therefore, the main goal of this masters degree is to support the hypothesis that, even being politically opposite, Ipês and CPC made use of very similar cinematographic referential.

Esta dissertação tem o objetivo de investigar o cinema de propaganda política produzido por duas associações de caráter ideológico, entre os anos 1961 e 1964: o Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais (Ipês), dirigido principalmente por ricos empresários liberais e anticomunistas; e o Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC da UNE), constituído por jovens artistas influenciados pelas idéias marxistas. Para tanto, busquei articular informações provenientes da análise intrínseca de seus filmes com as do contexto histórico em que foram feitos e exibidos e, em especial, as extraídas da documentação a que tive acesso, com o intuito, então, de compreender os modelos cinematográficos aos quais essas obras se alinharam. Ao estudar como ipesianos e cepecistas foram adversários em meio às instabilidades de um Brasil próximo ao Golpe de 1964, foi possível constatar como os dois grupos financiaram a atividade cinematográfica com a expectativa de intervir nos rumos socioeconômicos e culturais do país a partir de projetos conflitantes que, por um lado, pretendiam fortalecer o poder da elite com um capitalismo de base liberal e, por outro, romper com as estruturas de poder capitalistas. Nesse sentido, mesmo com essas divergências, a pesquisa demonstra como ambos utilizaram um discurso próximo em suas filmografias, repleto de similaridades, que se manifesta no uso de técnicas e linguagens idênticas, como é o caso das experiências estéticas didáticas e das representações do povo com a finalidade de concretizar um programa ideológico para a nação. Assim, esse mestrado procura defender a hipótese de que, mesmo politicamente opositores, Ipês e CPC manusearam um referencial cinematográfico com diversas semelhanças. / The present dissertation aims the investigation of the political propaganda film industry production between 1961 and 1964 by two ideological character associations: the Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais Ipês (Research and Social Studies Institute), managed especially by liberal and anticommunist rich businessmen; and the Centro Popular de Cultura CPC da UNE (Culture Popular Center), constituted of young artists influenced by marxist ideas. And to do so, I tried to join information provided by the intrinsic analysis of their films and the historic context in which they were produced and released and, especially, the information taken from the documentation I had access to, with the purpose of understanding the cinematographic models to which these films attached. By studying how ipesianos (term used to refer to the members of Ipês) and cepecistas (term used to refer to the members of CPC) were opponents in the instable Brazil near the 1964 coup detat, it was possible to observe how both groups financed their cinematographic activity, expecting to exercise some influence on the country cultural and socioeconomic course, by producing conflicting projects intended to, on the one hand, strengthen the power elite by supporting liberal based capitalism, and on the other hand, bring the capitalist power structures to an end. Nevertheless, even showing divergences, this research makes evident how both groups made use of analogue methodology on their filmographies, full of similarities, expressed in their identical techniques and languages, which can be seen in their didactical esthetic experiences and representations of the people with the purpose of concretize an ideological program for the nation. Therefore, the main goal of this masters degree is to support the hypothesis that, even being politically opposite, Ipês and CPC made use of very similar cinematographic referential.

The following text is an excerpt from the book Narrative Instability: Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture, which was originally published in 2019 with Universitätsverlag Winter as part of the series American Studies – A Monograph Series. The book introduces the concept of ‘narrative instability’ in order to make visible a new trend in contemporary US popular culture, to analyze this trend’s poetics, and to scrutinize its textual politics. It identifies those texts as narratively unstable that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to reconstruct what happened in a text’s plot, who its characters are, which of its diegetic worlds are real, or how narrative information is communicated in the first place. Despite—or rather, exactly because of—their confusing and destabilizing tendencies, such texts have attained mainstream commercial popularity in recent years across a variety of media, most prominently in films, video games, and television series. Focusing on three clusters of instability that form around identities, realities, and textualities, the book argues that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male middle-class Americans.