San Antonio College Library

Where the Girls Are is a romp through the confusing and contradictory images of women in American pop culture, as media critic Susan J. Douglas looks back at the television programs, popular music, advertising, and nightly news reports of the past four decades to reveal the decidedly mixed messages conveyed to girls and women coming of age in America. In a humorous and provocative analysis of our postwar cultural heritage (never losing sight of the...

Can a bout of laziness or a digressive spell actually open up paths to creativity and unexpected insights? In Obstruction Nick Salvato suggest that for those engaged in scholarly pursuits, laziness, digressiveness, and related experiences can be paradoxically generative. Rather than being dismissed as hindrances, these obstructions are to be embraced, clung to, and reoriented. Analyzing an eclectic range of texts and figures, from the Greek Cynics...

"Jack Santino's analysis encompasses everything from movies to romance novels, from television shows to comic books. One especially fascinating feature of this study is its examination of the packaged-foods industry and the manner in which soft drinks, beer, snack cakes, cookies, candy, and breakfast cereals are regularly repackaged to reflect particular holidays. In what becomes a central theme of the book, Santino shows how holidays give companies...

"Inventing Popular Culture is a lively and accessible history of the idea of popular culture by one of the leading experts in the field. Written from the critical perspective of cultural studies, the book traces the invention and reinvention of the concept of popular culture from the eighteenth-century "discovery" of folk culture to contemporary accounts of the cultural impact of globalization."--Jacket.

After directing Citizen Kane in his mid 20s, Orson Welles spent the next two decades involved in a dazzling variety of projects while struggling to control his own artistic destiny. By 1960, when this interview was filmed, the early promise of Welles' youth had transmuted into an oeuvre marked by scattered interests and problematic choices. Nevertheless, his creative fires were far from extinguished. Here viewers will find plenty of commentary from...

Native Informant is Leo Braudy's first book after his widely acclaimed and award-winning history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown. With a verve that breaks down the boundaries between film, literature, and popular culture, Braudy discusses writers and filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Daniel Defoe, Ernst Lubitsch, Emile Zola, Susan Sontag, and Richard Condon. His subjects include madness in the eighteenth century, the Hollywood blacklist, westerns,...

From religious beliefs and legends to movies and TV shows, from advertising and celebrities to Internet sites and photo ops, this illustrated A-Z encyclopedia makes it easy to locate each topic, and the opportunities for further research assure its timeliness.