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- Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020
Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020
Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Mediated heroes? Media-made heroes and the mediation of the heroic
By Anne JerslevThe article asks to what extent Daniel Boorstein’s generalized and cultural pessimistic description of the rise of the culture of celebrified visibility and the demise of the hero in the 1960s can be used in order to understand contemporary mediated heroism? In answering the question, the article suggests that it is useful to distinguish between media-made heroism and mediated heroism. Moreover, it argues that celebrification does not in itself mean that heroism vanishes. By contrast, the suggestion is that we should instead look into ways different media genres allow for different kind of heroes. The article goes through three different examples in order to substantiate these claims: the finale of the first Big Brother programme in Denmark from 2001, a CBS 60 Minutes news segment about air captain Chesley Sullenberger’s landing his plane on the Hudson River and rescuing all onboard in January 2009 and finally a more lengthy discussion of the Danish version of the US factual entertainment programme Alene i vildmarken (Alone in the Wilderness). The point of the article is that generic framing is crucial to the negotiation and, hence, to both setting limits and expanding possibilities for contemporary interpretations of heroism.
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Heroic affect and structures of national feeling on British television: 1990s Sharpe vs. 2010s The Last Kingdom
More LessThis article uses the affective and affecting concept of the hero to trace the structures of national feeling in two British television series: Sharpe (ITV 1993–97) and The Last Kingdom (BBC 2015–17). Both series are adaptations of military historical fiction by the bestselling author Bernard Cornwell but were created in and for two different periods in the United Kingdom. Television drama articulates the anxieties, hopes and needs of the time when it is produced. Its multimodal medium enables complex affective arrangements of (heroic) character, plot, genre conventions and televisual style. The article shows that Sharpe and The Last Kingdom present occasions for the viewers to perceive their hero characters as affective constructs, and it asks whether the hero affect is linked to an equally affective conception of nationhood. When viewed through the lens of the heroic, the series indicate a shift in structures of national feeling between the 1990s and the 2010s. Sharpe invited its contemporary viewers to perceive the titular character as heroic, but the aesthetic arrangement in which the character predominantly appears is that of the swashbuckler genre with a focus on stirring adventure; the hero affect is dissociated from an affective concept of nationhood. By contrast, The Last Kingdom links its hero to the nation in a highly affective and affecting manner, and its aesthetic arrangement draws considerably on the conventions of epic, a genre of national significance and the aesthetics of the sublime.
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Discovering new dimensions: Affect and the heroic in Doctor Who
More LessThe British television series Doctor Who often depicts the discovery of new dimensions that provoke both affective experiences and heroic moments. Every discovery of a new dimension in Doctor Who is overwhelming, sudden and transformative, a moment of wonder and inspiration. This article considers three episodes, featuring discoveries of a new dimension of space (‘The Rings of Akhaten’ 2013), agency (‘Dark Water’ 2014) and imagination (‘Vincent and the Doctor’ 2010), which all combine affect and the heroic, albeit in different ways. Acknowledging the difficulty of grasping moments of affecting and being affected due to their dynamic and pre-reflexive nature, the article uses close readings of selected scenes to narrow down the descriptive gap as far as possible. The case study of ‘Dark Water’ also includes an analysis of the episode’s reception in reviews and on social media platforms to highlight the actual affective response of the audience. The episodes’ narratives of discovering new dimensions of space, agency and imagination, medialized through specific audio-visual means, closely intertwine affective experiences with heroic moments: affective experiences can trigger heroic action, a heroic claim of agency can have an affective dimension and the ability to affect and be affected can in itself be heroized.
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Affect is not innocent: How affect can evolve into an ideological space
More LessWhile being affected, as the processural embodiment of emotions, is often seen with positive bias and as a literary or aesthetic quality, I will argue that affectivity is not restricted to emotive or aesthetical happenings, but that it opens ways to share ideologies through narratives. Due to affects that audiences experience, they can evolve into a state of being morally off-guard due to the profound emotive response to certain dramatic elements. Heroic elements in narratives seem to amplify such uncritical acceptance of both behaviour and ideologies. They allow audiences to embrace ideas they might otherwise reject because of their allegiance to heroized figures. The article elaborates on this specific ideological element of spectatorship and discusses it within the field of performing arts by making reference to the work of, among others, The Panic Movement, Jerzy Grotowski and Romeo Castellucci. I will analyse the strategies employed in performing arts to create affective experiences, such as mirror neurons, transparency, shock effects or alienating effects. The article combines insights from the research field of spectatorship and morality, as affect allows audiences to side with ideologies they would normally oppose. I argue that affect is not only a highway to the heart of audiences but can simultaneously be a silencer for the moral mind.
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Ecothriller heroics: Affect and spectatorship in fictions of climate change
More LessThis article examines the representation of climate change and heroic agency in recent European and North American ecothrillers. Through the use of four literary case studies, it shows how heroic figurations support an idea of climate change as a distinct disastrous event. Moreover, the heroic is shown to bring out images of a threatening other, usually in the shape of a distinct villain, who gives shape to forms of diffuse, indirect agencies as they are associated with anthropogenic climate change. In addition, the ideal positions of hero and perpetrator are articulated to larger normative and ideological frameworks, which the heroic figuration frames as irreconcilable. In this regard, markedly similar structures can be observed in novels that seek to present climate change as a genuine threat, such as L. A. Larkin’s Thirst and texts that follow a climate-sceptic agenda, such as Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. However, this article also shows how the hero’s position towards the sublime, as well as audio-visual tropes of destruction, can entail a tentative reformulation of the recipient, as in Bernard Besson’s The Greenland Breach. Finally, this article turns to Liz Jensen’s The Rapture, which is shown to follow a plot-driven, suspenseful thriller structure but withdraws heroic or prophetic authority over the disaster it represents and, in doing so, brings out the epistemological and ethical instability of the spectator’s position.
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