San Antonio College Library

"Henry Jenkins, one of America's most respected media analysts, delves beneath the new media hype to uncover the important cultural transformations that are taking place as media converge. He takes us into the secret world of Survivor Spoilers, where avid Internet users pool their knowledge to unearth the show's secrets before they are revealed on the air. He introduces us to young Harry Potter fans who are writing their own Hogwarts tales while executives...

"This collection of essays explores the interplay between popular culture and politics, using popular culture as a lens through which to view political life in the United States. Ranging from discussions including Murphy Brown, rap music, and censorship, the essays encourage critical thinking about the ways in which popular culture shapes, reflects, and responds to the political climate." "The core supposition is that the way we spend our free time...

For centuries the apocalypse has been a recurrent theme within art, literature, music, and more recently cinema. This collection of essays examines the influence of apocalyptic texts on popular cultural products, focusing on the timelessness and malleability of their themes to audiences.

This book focuses exclusively on struggles to define the "single girl" character in TV and film during a transformative period in American society. The author has scoured a wide range of source materials, unstudied film and television scripts, magazines, novels, and advertisements to demonstrate how controversial female characters pitted fears of societal breakdown against the growing momentum of the women's rights movement. The book focuses on the...

Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture is an engaging cultural studies critique of advertising and its impacts on American society. Arthur Asa Berger looks at marketing strategies, sex and advertising, consumer culture, political advertising, and communication theory and process to give an accessible overview of advertising in America. He explores how advertising works and how society does or doesn't respond to it, and he gives two detailed interpretations...

The last decade of the millennium was, in many ways, the most diverse and fascinating in the history of American culture. Alternative subcultures gained unprecedented exposure, manifest in such phenomena as grunge music, "gansta" rap, hip-hop fashion, raves, extreme sports, and the art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Twelve narrative chapters depict the United States as brought to you by Generation X--a culture busting out in new and unforeseen...

"This book examines contemporary American consciousness, considering the factors that have driven society toward gossip and sensationalism at the cost of substance and depth." "Arden discusses the growing epidemic of acrimony, superficiality, attention deficit disorder, and complaints of ennui. He targets the reasons why American children have expressed their confused rage with deadly weapons, why a president boasts that he earned C's in college,...

"To what extent was William Faulkner's deeply ambivalent relationship to - and involvement with - American popular culture reflected in his modernist or "art" fiction? Peter Lurie finds convincing evidence that Faulkner was keenly aware of commercial culture and adapted its formulas, strategies, and in particular, its visual techniques into the language of his novels of the 1930s. Lurie contends that Faulkner's modernism can be best understood in...