Cultural Studies

The first in the Media-Life-Universe trilogy, this volume explores a transdisciplinary notion of media and technology, exploring media as technology, with special attention to its material, historical and ecological ramifications. The authors reconceptualize media from environmental, ecological and systems approaches, drawing not only on media and communication studies, but also philosophy, sociology, political science, biology, art, computer science, information studies and other disciplines.

Featuring a group of internationally known scholars, this collection explores evolving definitions of media and how media technologies are transforming theory and practice. As the current media includes a wider and wider range of concepts, products, services and institutions, the definition of media continues to be in a state of flux. What are media today? How is media studies evolving? How have technologies transformed communication and media theory, and informed praxis? What are some of the futures of media?

The collection challenges traditional notions of media, as well as concepts such as freedom of expression, audience empowerment and participatory media, and explores emergent media including transmedia, virtual reality, online games, metatechnology, remediation and makerspaces. 

This is the first volume in the MEDIA • LIFE • UNIVERSE Trilogy. LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry 9781789382655 follows and builds upon this 2021 collection.

This interdisciplinary anthology explores the complex relationships in an artist’s life between fact and fiction, presentation and existence, and critique and creation, and examines the work that ultimately results from these tensions.

 

Using a combination of critical and personal essays and interviews, MASKS presents Bowie as the key exemplifier of the concept of the 'mask', then further applies the same framework to other liminal artists and thinkers who challenged the established boundaries of the art/pop academic worlds, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Søren Kierkegaard, Yukio Mishima and Hunter S. Thompson. Featuring contributions from John Gray and Slavoj Žižek and interviews with Gary Lachman and Davide De Angelis, this book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural criticism, aesthetics and the philosophy of art; practising artists; and fans of Bowie and other artists whose work enacts experiments in identity.

Antônio Carlos Jobim has been called the greatest of all contemporary Brazilian songwriters. He wrote both popular and serious music and was a gifted piano, guitar and flute player. One of the key figures in the creation of the bossa nova style, Jobim’s music made a lasting impression worldwide, and many of his songs are now standards of the popular music repertoire.

 

In The Music of Antônio Carlos Jobim, one of the first extensive musicological analyses of the Brazilian composer, Peter Freeman examines the music, philosophy and circumstances surrounding the creation of Jobim’s popular songs, instrumental compositions and symphonic works. Freeman attempts to elucidate not only the many musical influences that formed Jobim’s musical output, but also the stylistic peculiarities that were as much the product of a gifted composer as the rich musical environment and heritage that surrounded him.

An overview of the visual arts fundamentals, Moving the Eye Through 2-D Design provides a step-by-step approach to understanding what causes us to look at a painting, photograph, or any two-dimensional media and what is needed to maintain visual interest. This volume introduces a goal-oriented method that applies aspects of line, shape, value, and color directly to moving the viewer's eye to and through a composition. With this method, artists learn to incorporate feeling into the creative process from the outset rather than leaving it as a subjective afterthought. Equally applicable to the fine arts, applied arts, and digital media, Moving the Eye Through 2-D Design provides a simple and comprehensive methodology through which artists can create dynamic art. 

ARS (Artists Rights Society) requires for the e-book that a statement be affixed to the website, 'Reproduction, including downloading of this work is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of the Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York'.

Modern Argentine Masculinities gathers essays that explore the social construction of gender from the nineteenth century to the present. Authors analyze literary and cinematic texts, as well as contemporary popular songs, and offer a wide-ranging picture of the performance of masculinity as it has evolved and adapted since the consolidation of Argentina as a modern nation. This captivating interdisciplinary volume sheds new light on the construction of heterosexual and queer Argentine masculinities.

Grigorii Aleksandrov’s musical comedy films, created with composer Isaak Dunaevskii, were the most popular Russian cinema of the 1930s and ’40s. Drawing on studio documents, press materials, and interviews with surviving film crew members, The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov presents the untold production history of the films. Salys explores how Aleksandrov’s cinema preserved the paradigms of the American musical, including its comedic tradition, using both to inscribe the foundation myths of the Stalin era in the national consciousness. As the first major study to situate these films in the cultural context of the era, this book will be essential to courses on Russian cinema and Soviet culture.

Is obsession with the Royal Family in Britain a fact of culture or an illusion of media culture? What interest do the European media display in their royal families? Does twenty-first century monarchy remain a political and ideological force - or is it just an economic commodity? Media, Monarchy and Power provides a radical insight into the cultural and political functioning of royalty in five countries. Blain and O'Donnell examine the bonds between monarchies and their 'subjects' or 'citizens', and the relationships between royal families, the media, and nation-states. Numerous case-studies from press and television in Europe and the UK support a theoretical account of the operation of monarchy and royalty in the media. Central to the concerns of Media, Monarchy and Power are the complex relationship between Britain and Europe and the limits of British political modernization.