Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture (MEDIA AND POPULAR CULTURE)

History

Turner, Graeme

HODGE, Bob

Fiske, John

Australia & Oceania

Allen& Unwin

If it had been written thirty years ago, a book with this title would almost certainly have been expected to deal with "high culture": the elite art forms seen to provide the best that has been written, spoken, or performed over the ages. This book will chart some of the reasons for this shift, sites of investigation, key methodologies and theoretical orientations. The work of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and in particular the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies has established the respectability of popular culture - from the mass media to sport and dance crazes - on an academic and intellectual agenda from which it has been excluded. This exclusion had exacted a great cost; what it regarded as peripheral and meretricious included the most basic and pervasive of social processes, practices, and meanings. It is from these peripheral networks of meaning and pleasure the culture is constructed. This book presents a history of the development of these ideas, specifying what seem to be the most principles central of British cultural studies in Chapter 2. Part 2 looks in more depth at the central categories within the field: texts, audiences, the social production of everyday life, and the problem of ideology. The first chapter, necessarily, has some heavy ground clearing to do, and those who are already familiar with semiotics and structuralism may wish only to "skim" through it on their way to Chapter Two. Throughout, the author presents descriptive accounts of the significant contributions to each topic; in many cases, this work is quite daunting to read in its original form and the account may guide both those who intend to seek out the original book or article, and those who don't. As often as possible, the author has chosen to allow the original works to speak for themselves, amd has quoted liberally.

British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Media and Popular Culture, No 7)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Unwin Hyman

National fictions: Literature, film, and the construction of Australian narrative (Australian cultural studies)

NATIONAL FICTIONS is a study of Australian literature and film. It is also a study of Australian culture, viewing the novels and the films as products of a specific culture as narratives with similar structures, functions, forms and meanings. It covers a wide range of texts, offering both close analysis and an account of their place within the system of meanings the book proposes as those dominant in Australian culture. As a result it makes important steps towards defining the distinctiveness of Australian culture as well as its literature and film. Topics such as the contrasts between the land and the city, the role of the individual and the emergence of selfhood are recurrent themes in Australian film and writing. The author uses these themes to examine narrative, characterisation and the changing approach and methods of Australian writers and film makers. 'The style is lucid, the analysis persuasive and the argument logically sustained... I feet it will prove one of those seminal works to which all future writers in these areas will need to refer', John McLaren. Graeme Turner attended universities in Australia, Canada and the UK and now teaches Australian Studies at the Queensland Institute of Technology. Founding editor of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, he has worked as a musician for a number of years and has published widely in the areas of Australian literature, film and cultural studies.

Anthropology

Essays in Media and Cultural Studies: In Transition

Reference

Routledge

Spanning a decade of key research, this collection brings together a selection of essays and chapters from leading media scholar Graeme Turner for the first time. The organising theme of transition focuses on both the state of the media as it continues its evolution into the digital era, and the fields of media and cultural studies as they grapple with modifying their approaches and assumptions in response to the changing dynamics of the systems they study. In their own attempts to understand a range of contemporary moments over the decade, these essays also provide a personal history of Graeme Turner's participation in the key debates within media and cultural studies. The essays deal with the shifting states of television, with the changing relation between the media and the state, the rise of celebrity, and the role of a critical agenda for media and cultural studies in the future. The collection is introduced and concluded by two new essays, respectively assessing the recent past and the necessary futures for these fields of study. Providing key insights into a range of topics, this book is ideal for students and scholars looking to deepen their understanding of the transitionary nature of media and cultural studies.

Making It National: Nationalism and Australian popular culture

National Fictions: Literature, film and the construction of Australian narrative

Words, Language & Grammar

This book should be of interest to students and teachers of culture, media and communications, as well as those studying film itself.

Film as social practice (Studies in communication)

Excellent in the role of the audience in using and making sense of film.

Film As Social Practice (Studies in Communications)

Routledge & K.Paul

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