No description available.

No description available.

New forms of tourism are on the rise where the incentive to travel is not primarily induced by a country’s heritage, but by mediatized narratives, characters and locations starring in products such as movies, comics and literature. This so-called contents tourism is considered promising by some, but the question is: who benefits? Europe is often understood as the old continent, a place with a rich history. Modern products capitalize on this sense of oldness and tell new narratives, providing Europe with new identities. These differing identities create challenges for cities and therefore demand to be mitigated. Utilizing the Japanese concept of contents tourism, this thesis aims to shed a light on the impact of these forms of tourism on city identities. This provides a better understanding on how interests, and entwined identities, challenge one another in European cities. Three case studies are employed: Harry Potter tourism in Oxford, tourism induced by the Millennium series in Stockholm and Twilight tourism in the Italian city of Volterra. It argues that there are three ways in which a city can perceive identities brought about by contents tourism: acceptance, indifference or reluctance. Not all alternative identities are considered challenging, but contents tourism influences city identities regardless.

The purpose of this thesis is to consider three opposing statements regarding aesthetics in our popular culture. The first statement is that the youth of this age are demolishing the old standards of aesthetic taste and are creating a nonaesthetic; the second statement is that the youth are enlarging the vision and scope of the accepted standard of aesthetic and changing its direction; the thrid statement is that the creations of the youth in our popular culture of today are neither new nor nonaesthetic, but merely a continuation of aesthetics as they are accepted. One statement will be chosen as the most valid of the three.

Student Number : 0302215H - PhD thesis - School of Language and Literature Studies - Faculty of Humanities / This study explores the meaning of contemporary Kenyan popular music by undertaking literary interpretations of song lyrics and musical styles. In making these interpretations, the fabric of popular song is shown to be a network of referents and associations with texts situated both within and outside of the song-texts. As polyphonic discourse, these vast range of textual and paratextual referents opens up various points of engagement between artiste, songtext and audience and in the process, the surplus meanings generated by both the poetry of the text and the referents embedded within it account for the significance of popular songs as concrete articulations that mediate the realities of modern Kenya. Through the six chapters that make up the core of the study we see the mini-dramas that are played out in the material conditions within which the songs are produced; in the iconographies that are generated by artistes' stage names and album titles; in the strategies of memory work that connect present-day realities to old cultural practices; in the soundtracks of urban spaces and in those of domesticated global cultural trends and finally, in the mediation of the antinomies surrounding the metanarrative of the nation and the realization of political transition. I conclude by suggesting that Kenyan popular music demonstrates how contemporary postcolonial texts inform one another, opening up a dialogue between texts and also between local events, experiences and knowledges. Equally important, the study defines contemporary Kenyan culture by working out the sources of the images and idioms built up in this music and accepting the complexities of postcolonial existence as a site of fluid interaction between various cultural practices and competing modernities.

Throughout history magic has been an art that has instilled awe and wonder in its spectators. The magician used to be held in high esteem, as teacher, as scientist, as priest and even as philosopher. This being the case, throughout the history of philosophy, philosophers have deemed magic to be deception, to be a mode of misleading people into believing what is not true. Through the modern philosophical era, philosophers have been seeking a purely scientific method for questioning reality. It seems that, today, even the magician views his or her art as mere entertainment. The purpose of my thesis is to dispel the belief that magic is purely a hobby with no artistic value and that, like other artworks, magic too can cause one to question existence. / by Mark J. Gobeo. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, FL : 2008 Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This study examines two television soap operas and their consumption by a select group of teenagers. The soap operas in question, Neighbours and Home and Away, are produced in Australia and watched by large audiences in the UK. The study's broadest aim is to discover the nature of the relationship between the programmes and their teenage viewers. In order to meet this aim, the study combines textual analysis and audience research. Following a review of the textual analysis of soap opera, Neighbours and Home and Away are examined in detail as texts. The audience study is then introduced and located. The empirical study involved tape-recording interviews with groups of 13-16 year olds in one Edinburgh High School, and with individual teenagers in their own homes. In total, 50 teenagers were interviewed. The recurring findings of the audience study are analysed in detail. The final two chapters of the thesis contextualize the findings and conclusions of the textual and audience studies. A selective genealogy is provided which theoretically locates Neighbours and Home and Away and their consumption as cultural practices in self-government. It is argued that the two programmes should be understood as integral parts of a broad but specific arena for learning. It is argued that interviewees use Neighbours and Home and Away as cultural resources. They learn how to conduct themselves in intimate and social relationships, and, in particular, learn how to practise and reconstruct their gendered selves. It is argued that the model of analysis elaborated is valuable because: it best explains the specific nature of Neighbours and Home and Away and their consumption; it provides a way of moving beyond something of an orthodoxy in soap opera analysis; and it avoids the binary logic of some recent arguments about popular culture and social change.

This thesis takes as the object of its enquiry children's talk about the range of different media texts which they circulate amongst themselves in informal settings. It uses this data to raise questions about how we can conceptualise literacy in a multimedia age; the role that talk about texts plays in establishing what it means to read and to be a reader; and the relationship between talk, text and context. The thesis contributes to the development of a social theory of literacy by linking differences observed in ways of talking about texts to different aspects of the social contexts in which those texts circulate. It redefines the social contexts for reading which shape a given literacy event in terms of the social processes through which texts are made available to particular readers ii. particular settings. These social processes are described in terms of the social regulation of texts. The methodological and theoretical issues the thesis tackles arise largely from the attempt to construct a new language of description (See Bernstein, 1996) for the range of talk about texts collected as part of the research data. The language used to describe the data has become the means for making visible aspects of literacy as a social practice which have been previously overlooked. In this respect, the act of description is therefore in itself theoretical: it helps formulate what it refers to.

This thesis is a study of popular social history and education in mid-twentieth century Britain. It argues that the ‘history of everyday life’ was a guiding framework for how ‘ordinary’ people sought to understand themselves and the world around them in this period. The ‘history of everyday life’ told stories of how the ‘uneventful’ lives, practices, feelings, and social and material environments of individuals changed across generations. It was the dominant form of popular social history in Britain from 1918 to the end of the 1960s, and it flourished long before academic social history championed similar themes, in a different idiom and for very different audiences. This thesis follows the ‘history of everyday life’ across a range of public-facing, educational institutions that were interested in producing histories for a mass audience. It delves into the myriad ways in which ‘amateur’ historians (often women) produced and disseminated ‘everyday’ histories. The ‘history of everyday life’ was a flexible intellectual resource available to both the radical left and conservative right. Whilst still attending to this full political spectrum, this thesis shifts focus away from explicit ideologies to the visual, emotional, and practical elements of historical activity.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study seeks to uncover the non-coercive, intricate and insidious ways which have generated both the 'willing' acceptance of and resistance to the rule of Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe. I consider how popular culture is a site that produces complex and persuasive meanings and enactments of citizenship and belonging in contemporary Zimbabwe and focus on 'agency,' 'subversion' and their interconnectedness or blurring. The study argues that understanding nationalism's impact in Zimbabwe necessitates an analysis of the complex ways in which dominant articulations of nationalism are both imbibed and contested, with its contestation often demonstrating the tremendous power of covert forms of resistance. The focus on the politics of popular culture in Zimbabwe called for eclectic and critical engagements with different social constructionist traditions, including postcolonial feminism, aspects of the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. My eclectic borrowing is aimed at enlisting theory to analyse ways in which co-optation, subversion and compromise often coexist in the meanings generated by various popular and public culture forms. These include revered national figures and symbols, sacrosanct dead bodies and retrievals, slogans and campaign material, sport, public speeches, the mass media and music. The study therefore explores political sites and responses that existing disciplinary studies, especially politics and history, tend to side-line. A central thesis of the study is that Zimbabwe, in dominant articulations of the nation, is often constituted in a discourse of anti-colonial war, and its present and future are imagined as a defence of what has already been gained from previous wars in the form of "chimurenga." I argue that formal sites of political contestation often reinforce forms of patriarchal, heterosexist, ethnic, neo-imperial and class authoritarianism often associated only with the ZANU PF as the overtly autocratic ruling party. In turning to diverse forms of popular culture and their reception, I identify and analyze sites and texts that, rather than constituting mere entertainment or reflecting organized and party political struggles, testify to the complexity and intensity of current forms of domination and resistance in the country. Contrary to the view that Zimbabwe has been witnessing a steady paralysis of popular protest, the study argues that slogans, satire, jokes, metaphor, music and general performance arts by the ordinary people are spaces on which "even the highly spectacular deployment of gender and sexuality to naturalize a nationalism informed by the 'efficacy' of a phallocentric power 'cult' is full of contestations and ruptures."