Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015

This article examines popular culture and its effect on the European translations market. The dominant position of Anglo-Saxon culture in the global cultural economy has stimulated an imbalance in the flow of translations towards the English-language market. According to Lawrence Venuti, translations academic, this exposes Anglo-American publishing as ‘imperialistic abroad and xenophobic at home’. This article focuses solely on UK publishing in the European cultural context and determines whether the UK market pleads guilty to these controversial charges. First, the context of Venuti’s claim is established by presenting statistical evidence detailing the flow of translations to and from the United Kingdom. Leading figures from UK publishing, including literary agents, rights managers, critics and organizational bodies, have been interviewed regarding the charges brought against them by Venuti. Statements from these individuals are explored and their defence presented. In the main, representatives from UK publishing, although they consider Venuti’s terminology to be emotive and contentious, plead guilty to both charges. Findings benefit knowledge exchange with minority cultures and the international cultural economy.

‘Authenticity’ is a term often used loosely to evaluate musicians and products vis-à-vis social orders and genre conventions. Alternately, I claim that authenticity is better understood as a quality that arises from the experience of engagement between audiences, performers and musical products. My discussion focuses on one case study: a joint concert of the Israeli rock veterans Shalom Hanoch and Shlomo Artzi; authors whose repertoire is imagined to signify both their personality and a true sense of Israeliness. I therefore associate authenticity with the idea of subjectivity, the ability of a singer-songwriter to work within social order and to redefine it.

This discussion of Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s internationally circulated ‘popular highbrow’ films – 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile/Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (2007); and Dupa dealuri/Beyond the Hills (2012) – is grounded in the auteur theory. In particular, the analysis telescopes in on the thematic motif of surveillance that animates the two films. At the same time, on a Foucauldian view, the motif plays out in distinct forms in each cinematic text. In Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, surveillance in the late Ceaus¸escu-era is depicted as gaining expression through the internalized discipline of the monadic subject. In contrast, in the contemporaneous Beyond the Hills, surveillance implicates the practices of the pure community convened in distinction to an exiled other. Psychoanalytic concepts (primal crime, return of the repressed) are also summoned to tease out the social tensions in the films. Mungiu’s work vigorously cross-­examines the official mythologies of national harmony; in other words, Mungiu may be construed as engaging with what Mike Wayne calls ‘anti-national national cinema’. However laudable the practice of socially conscious critical film is, auto-problematization of ‘peripheral’ nations may also bring reproduction of marginalization in its train when the films circulate internationally.

This article investigates ways in which canonic discourses form part of the everyday popular music culture among both audiences and music critics in the early twenty-first century. By analysing reviews in which artists and albums of the so-called New Danish Wave are juxtaposed with Danish canonic artists and albums from the 1960s to the 1980s, it is argued that canonic discourse forms an important, yet unreflected or even unnoticed vehicle for the reception of the music in question. Even though a canonical fragmentation during the turn of the millennium may be identified on a global scale, the incident shows how national agendas and positions are able to go against this trend in a small-scale nation like Denmark.

Roald Dahl and Philosophy: A Little Nonsense Now and Then, Jacob M. Held (ed.) (2014) 1st ed., Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 243 pp., ISBN: 9781442222526, p/bk, £11.95

Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle, Dominique Nasta (2013) 1st ed., London: Wallflower Press, 256 pp. ISBN: 9780231167451, p/bk, £18.00; ISBN: 9780231167444, h/bk, £55.00

From Communism to Capitalism: Nation and State in Romanian Cultural Production, Florentina C. Andreescu (2013) 1st ed., New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 200 pp., ISBN: 9781137276919, h/bk, £62.50

Sport and Film, Seán Crosson (2013) Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, ISBN: 9780415569927, h/bk; ISBN: 9780415569934, p/bk, £78.40/£22.87