Cosy aphorisms such as “home is where the heart is” have always suggested a universal understanding of home. But home is a subjective concept that defies any homogenous designation. If, as Walter Benjamin told us, a consequence of modernity is the necessary sequestration of ‘bourgeois’ domestic spaces from an increasingly ‘modern’ outside world, such a spatial binarism is notably absent in the works of Irish and British women authors from 1929-1946. On the contrary, in these texts, domestic space has multiple functions, not least of which is its usefulness in exploring concepts of modernity, including the consequences of industrial scale warfare on civilian life. During this time, women authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien, Nancy Mitford, Evadne Price and Daphne du Maurier respond to the ways in which the ideas of home were in a continuous state of redefinition. They do this for multiple reasons. Factors changing these authors’ perceptions of d0mestic space vary from material, aesthetic, external, broadly philosophical and political. These issues are also sometimes deeply violent, as is seen, for instance, in the burnings of the houses of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency in the Irish War of Independence, and the destruction of houses by bombing in the London Blitz. This project analyses Irish and British domestic spaces as women authors imagine them after the formal segregation of the two countries with the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922). As both countries move in different political and cultural directions, so too, these authors perceive, do the meanings of home. This changes the ways in which authors construct both the conceptual ideas of home and the material realities of houses in both countries. Congruently, this cross-cultural analysis complicates our understanding of these women authors’ responses to changing meanings of home, women’s issues, and the experience of modernity in the period.

“Entertaining Culture: Mass Culture and Consumer Society in Argentina, 1898-1946” is a study of Argentine mass culture in a new consumer society: a new cultural dynamic that emerged around the turn of the century in Buenos Aires. This dynamic entailed a redefinition not only of the relationships between culture, creators, and publics, but also of those categories themselves. Early twentieth-century Argentine mass culture was a heterogeneous realm of cultural production and consumption in which varied and often conflicting ideologies, aesthetic convictions, and class or party allegiances jostled for purchase, creating a constant push and pull of competing desires and values. Within this context, criticism and ambivalence about the effects of cultural modernization was ubiquitous, a byproduct not only of the heterogeneity within mass culture itself, but also of the tension-filled incorporation of culture into the market. By analyzing Argentine mass culture in this light, my dissertation challenges monolithic understandings of mass culture that ignore how it exposed and grappled with the tensions in its own premises. The cultural dynamic of the period collapsed the categories of culture, consumer good, and entertainment and blurred the limits between production and consumption, often provoking dismay from creators, cultural critics, nationalists, and educators, frequently voiced from within mass culture itself. Mass culture adopted variety as a central premise, claiming to offer something for everyone and for every taste, in a business strategy designed to attract as many paying consumers as possible, and to turn them into brand loyalists. Cultural ventures also used a number of other tools, such as novelty, brevity, immediacy, familiarity, levity, and affordability, to expand their market share through entertainment, providing cultural production that fit the bill and encouraging Argentines to demand these qualities of the cultural production they consumed. Mass culture also encouraged Argentines to view the world through the logic of spectacle, according to which anything or anyone, given the mass cultural treatment, could be transformed into entertainment. While the transformation of culture into a for-profit entertainment venture and a consumer good made it possible for more aspiring artists to make a living at writing or performing, it also provoked frequent criticisms of the industrialization of culture, the mercantilism of producers, the quality of cultural works, and the naïveté of audiences and aspiring creators. To better understand the tensions in play in this new cultural dynamic, I advance the concept of “cultured consumption,” a term I use to identify the dominant ideal of consumption in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. As a loose complex of practices, cultured consumption was characterized by a tension between competing models of social aspiration: one, based on the performance of gentility and refinement, per aristocratic practices; another, founded upon a middle-class ideal of comfortable domesticity and family-centered values. Thus, by participating in cultured consumption, Argentines asserted their ascription to a certain set of potentially competing values and desires, from upward mobility and good taste to economy and family unity. Furthermore, according to the premises of cultured consumption, purchase of certain products and participation in certain activities would mark consumers as authentically and patriotically Argentine. Nevertheless, it was not clear how Argentine culture was to reconcile refinement and moderation, performance and authenticity, and public and private activity. Cultured consumption was, thus, both progressive and conservative, aspirational and protective of the status quo; in it, standards of taste took on moral and even political connotations. Through it, culture was both democratized and limited according to a set of sometimes competing standards and values. In this way, mass culture promised ever broader sectors of the population that by participating fully in it they could satisfy their heterogeneous desires, experience self-actualization, and improve their lot in life. At the same time, mass culture invoked consumption, spectatorship, and artistic aspirations as possible threats to the stability of the family and social structure to limit the expansion of access to culture and cultural production. Mass culture, thus, set itself up as the articulating joint between public and private life in Buenos Aires: a series of practices that increasingly defined participation in, and an interpretative lens that allowed Argentines to make sense of, public and private life—including mass culture and consumption themselves. Against the limited narratives of the period traditionally proposed by literary criticism and cultural history, this dissertation argues that it is precisely this heterogeneous area of mass cultural production that can help us better understand Argentine culture of the period more broadly: it allows us to see how these tensions played out on a massive scale. Considering cross-object study to be essential for understanding the new cultural dynamic, this dissertation recuperates archival materials and understudied genres such as mass-circulation periodicals, advertisements, reviews, advice literature, recitation manuals, celebrity profiles, and popular plays and music, and analyzes both the texts themselves and the interactions, institutions, and practices around them. This methodology allows me to do two things: first, to put disciplines such as consumer history and media studies in dialogue with literary criticism, theater history, and cultural studies; second, to complicate the narratives of the period traditionally espoused by literary critics and cultural historians. While the former, through their focus on aesthetic and political polemics, largely erased an area of cultural production massively consumed in the early twentieth century, the latter, by portraying culture as tangential to a more important political or economic narrative, deny culture its historical agency. My dissertation, in contrast, considers Argentine mass culture of the period to be not only a cultural dynamic that comprised systems of production, practices, and content, but, more broadly, the mouthpiece of a new worldview that redefined all areas of life. This worldview, originating in the cultural realm, would shape the course of Argentine social, economic, and political history to come. In foregrounding mass culture in this way, I propose a new corpus and lens for evaluating modernization in Buenos Aires.

Em 1921, o Conselho Nacional de Educação da Argentina aprovou a realização de um inquérito para compilar as tradições identificadas ao folclore nacional. A tarefa foi confiada a professores de milhares de escolas subordinadas ao órgão e localizadas, sobretudo, nas áreas rurais do país. Esse projeto relacionava-se às concepções de intelectuais identificados ao nacionalismo da chamada Geração do Centenário da Independência de 1910, preocupados em reafirmar a identidade nacional diante de um contexto de instabilidade social e de uma sociedade heterogênea, conformada por indígenas, imigrantes etc. Por meio da análise da documentação coletada no Território Nacional do Río Negro, antiga região de fronteira recém-incorporada como unidade político-administrativa do Estado, serão discutidos os alcances e limites desse projeto, tendo em vista os ideais nacionalistas, o contexto histórico nacional e local e as particularidades inerentes ao conceito de cultura popular, como as dinâmicas de circularidade. Desse modo, serão demonstradas as maneiras pelas quais os professores, enquanto intermediários culturais, atuaram nos espaços de negociação possíveis entre a proposta formal e a aplicação do inquérito, bem como a inserção da Encuesta na consolidação simbólica do Estado-nacional argentino. / In March 1921, the Argentinian National Education Council approved the realization of an enquiry that would collect national folklore traditions. That work was given to the teachers of the thousands schools under Council administration and located, substantially, at rural areas. The project was related to intellectuals conceptions aligned with so-called Independence Centenary Generation nationalism, dedicated to affirm national identity attributes in contrast to a context characterized by social instability and heterogeneous society, composed of native population, immigrants, etc. By means of analyzing documents collected on Río Negro National Territory, boundary region newly added as a federal unity, they will be discussed ranges and limits of the project, considering nationalistic ideals, national and regional historical contexts and particularities concerned to popular culture concept, like interrelationship dynamics for example. Thus it will be demonstrated how teachers, as passeurs culturels, acted on the negotiation margins between formal proposal and real enquiry application, as well as Encuesta insertion in symbolic consolidation of Argentinian nation state.

Uma manifestação da cultura popular Brasileira é a razão de interesse em nossa pesquisa: o Bumba Meu Boi da cidade de São Paulo. Tal folguedo existe no Brasil desde aproximadamente o século XVII, surgindo primeiramente nas regiões do nordeste brasileiro. Hoje é uma das manifestações culturais mais populares entre as existentes em nosso país. Dentre todas as regiões onde o Boi é tematizado, o foco de nosso estudo é o Boi do Grupo Cupuaçu, Boi do Morro do Querosene, localizado na cidade de São Paulo, bairro do Butantã. Região esta que apresenta e comemora o folguedo inspirado no Bumba Meu Boi do Maranhão. Os festejos acerca do Boi que acontecem no Morro do Querosene envolvem não só os brincantes que são integrantes do Boi, como toda a comunidade ali presente: moradores, comerciantes e também o público que participa prestigiando os eventos. Nossa pesquisa teve como objetivo geral compreender a encenação do folguedo do Bumba Meu Boi realizado pelo Grupo Cupuaçu na cidade de São Paulo, como forma de identidade dos brincantes com sua terra natal de onde tal manifestação é oriunda; e como objetivos específicos procuramos a- delimitar a compreensão sobre identidade cultural na ótica dos Estudos Culturais, entendendo que ela não é permanente, e é reconstruída a partir das vivências dos sujeitos em determinado contexto sócio-histórico; b- identificar o processo constituinte do Bumba Meu Boi enquanto manifestação presente no período festivo do ciclo junino no Brasil, atrelado à um conjunto de influencias da miscigenação do povo brasileiro (indígena, africana e portuguesa), e do catolicismo jesuítico. Enquanto metodologia, trata-se de uma pesquisa do tipo qualitativa, num caráter exploratório. Serão utilizados os enfoques bibliográfico e de campo. Para a pesquisa de campo optou-se pela aplicação do estudo de caso, utilizando como instrumento de pesquisa a observação em equipe. Conclui-se que os folguedos do Bumba Meu Boi encenados pelo Grupo Cupuaçu sofrem mudanças em sua concepção, devido ao contexto urbano da cidade de São Paulo, exercendo influência direta em sua produção / One manifestation of Brazilian popular culture is the reason for interest in our research: Bumba Meu Boi in São Paulo. Such merriment exists in Brazil since about the seventeenth century, first appearing in the regions of northeast Brazil. Today is one of the most popular cultural events between existing in our country. Among all regions where the Ox is thematized, the focus of our study is the Ox Cupuacu Group, Ox of Morro do Querosene, located in São Paulo, district of Butantã. This region that displays and celebrates the merriment inspired by the Bumba Meu Boi about Maranhão. The festival happening in the Morro do Querosene involving not only the revelers who are members of the Ox, as the entire community present there: residents, traders and also the public participating prestige events. Our research goal is to understand the general merriment of the staging of Bumba Meu Boi conducted by Cupuacu Group in São Paulo, as a form of identity of revelers with their homeland where such expression is derived; and specific: a- to delimit the understanding of cultural identity in the perspective of Cultural Studies, understanding that it is not permanent, and is reconstructed from the experiences of the subjects in a particular socio-historical context goals; b- to identify the constituent process of the Bumba Meu Boi while in this festive period junino cycle in Brazil manifestation linked to a set of influences from the miscegenation of the Brazilian people (indigenous, African and Portuguese), and Jesuit Catholicism. As a methodology, it is a qualitative study, an exploratory character. The bibliographic and field approaches will be used. For the field research was chosen application case study, using as a research tool in the observation. We conclude that the mirth of the Bumba Meu Boi staged by Cupuacu Group undergo changes in its design due to the urban context of the city of São Paulo, direct influence on their production

Korea has become a strong influencer of global popular culture. With a handful of Korean celebrities entering mainstream U.S. pop music, Hallyu, the Korean Wave, has been growing tremendously in popularity. Following this global trend, American audiences are increasingly tuning into K-pop. The current study uses Q-sort methodology to investigate the motives, opinions, and attitudes of American fans of K-pop, specifically to find what drives people to seek music whose roots lie in an unfamiliar cultural landscape. Study results show that non-Korean K-pop fans in the United States fall into three distinct groups: the human lovers ("Honey honey, how you thrill me"), the product and production appreciators ("Music is my life"), and the social connectors ("With a little help from my friends"). Although the music appreciators and the socializers have been identified in previous K-pop research, the "Honey honey" group is a new category in K-pop culture research.

Book Summary: Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age examines a host of differing positions on media in order to explore how those positions can inform one another and build a basis for future engagements with media theory, research, and practice. Herbig, Herrmann, and Tyma have brought together a number of media scholars with differing paradigmatic backgrounds to debate the relative applicability of existing theories and in doing so develop a new approach: polymediation. Each contributor’s disciplinary background is diverse, spanning interpersonal communication, media studies, organizational communication, instructional design, rhetoric, mass communication, gender studies, popular culture studies, informatics, and persuasion. Although each of these scholars brings with them a unique perspective on media’s role in people’s lives, what binds them together is the belief that meaningful discourse about media must be an ongoing conversation that is open to critique and revision in a rapidly changing mediated culture. By studying media in a polymediated way, Beyond New Media addresses more completely our complex relationship to media(tion) in our everyday lives.

Book Summary: Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age examines a host of differing positions on media in order to explore how those positions can inform one another and build a basis for future engagements with media theory, research, and practice. Herbig, Herrmann, and Tyma have brought together a number of media scholars with differing paradigmatic backgrounds to debate the relative applicability of existing theories and in doing so develop a new approach: polymediation. Each contributor’s disciplinary background is diverse, spanning interpersonal communication, media studies, organizational communication, instructional design, rhetoric, mass communication, gender studies, popular culture studies, informatics, and persuasion. Although each of these scholars brings with them a unique perspective on media’s role in people’s lives, what binds them together is the belief that meaningful discourse about media must be an ongoing conversation that is open to critique and revision in a rapidly changing mediated culture. By studying media in a polymediated way, Beyond New Media addresses more completely our complex relationship to media(tion) in our everyday lives.

Excerpt:Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Haven’t we heard enough about this show? After all, it was cancelled over 10 years ago. Plus, it is the most studied series in the history of television.

Book Summary: Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age examines a host of differing positions on media in order to explore how those positions can inform one another and build a basis for future engagements with media theory, research, and practice. Herbig, Herrmann, and Tyma have brought together a number of media scholars with differing paradigmatic backgrounds to debate the relative applicability of existing theories and in doing so develop a new approach: polymediation. Each contributor’s disciplinary background is diverse, spanning interpersonal communication, media studies, organizational communication, instructional design, rhetoric, mass communication, gender studies, popular culture studies, informatics, and persuasion. Although each of these scholars brings with them a unique perspective on media’s role in people’s lives, what binds them together is the belief that meaningful discourse about media must be an ongoing conversation that is open to critique and revision in a rapidly changing mediated culture. By studying media in a polymediated way, Beyond New Media addresses more completely our complex relationship to media(tion) in our everyday lives.

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