The interweaving of popular generic modes and modernist techniques in Nostromo : A tale of the seaboard

Nostromo. A Tale of the Seaboard (1904), una de las novelas más experimentales del período modernista temprano, ha sido considerada la obra maestra de Joseph Conrad y su más grande lienzo. Un rasgo particular de la novela es que en ella coexisten la experimentación técnica del modernismo, la altamente difusa ficción del narrador y la situación de narración de historias y el paradigma narrativo de los subgéneros "degradados" de la novela de aventuras, el romance y el melodrama. Este estudio indaga las relaciones que se establecen entre dichos elementos, a todas luces anacrónicos o pertenecientes a espacios culturales diferentes, y se propone mostrar que estas discontinuidades no deben ser consideradas una falla sino índices de una tensión constitutiva de la novela.

Villains galore; the heyday of the popular story weekly.

Mode of access: Internet.

Humour and Irony in Dutch Post-war Fiction Film /

This study examines a range of Dutch post-war fiction films and also works as an implicit overview on the basis of types of humour, like low-class comedy, neurotic romances; deliberate camp, homosocial jokes, cosmic irony, grotesque satire.

Select tales. Being a compilation of singular, interesting, remarkable and authentic narratives, ancient and modern. Selected principally from the most esteemed and popular literary works, European and American, the greater part of which have never before been offered to the public in book form.

14th. A remarkable vision of Charles the eleventh of Sweden.--15th. An awful and authentic narrative of the monster Benito de Soto, the pirate of the Morning Star.--16th. The first and last sacrifice.--17th. The tiger's cave; or, The melancholy and tragical fate of Captains Wharton and Lincoln.--18th. The first and last love.--19th. The Scottish landlady, and her lodgers ... by Mr. Galt.--20th. Traditionary anecdotes of the Countess of Stair.--21st. First and last love.--Agnes Fitzroy.--22nd. The death of Alice Bland ... by the author of the Tales of a pilgrim--23d. Herby and his twelve wives.--24th. The murder hole.--25th. A remarkable trial of murders.

Deutsche märchen : a collection of popular German tales by various authors /

Mode of access: Internet.

Tales of humour and romance, selected from popular German writers,

Madame de Scuderi, by E.T. Hoffman.--The dishonoured irreclaimable, by F. Schiller.--The death of an angel, by J.P. Richter.--The moon, by J.P. Richter.--The bridegroom's probation, by A.T.[!] E. Langbein.--The broken leg, by A.T.[!] E. Langbein.--The haunted castle. by A. La Fontaine.--Woldemar, by T.C. Körner.--The harp, by T.C. Körner.

Freshman 15: Fact or fiction?

Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate changes in body weight, BMI, body composition, and fat distribution among freshman women during their 1st year of college. Research Methods and Procedures: Freshman women during the 2004 to 2005 academic year were recruited to participate. The initial baseline visit occurred within the first 6 weeks of the fall 2004 semester, with the follow-up visit occurring during the last 6 weeks of the spring 2005 semester. At each visit, height, weight, BMI, waist and hip circumferences, and body composition (by DXA) were obtained. Results: One hundred thirty-seven participants completed both the fall and spring visits. Significant (p < 0.0001) increases between the fall and spring visits were observed for body weight (58.6 vs. 59.6 kg), BMI (21.9 vs. 22.3), percentage body fat (28.9 vs. 29.7), total fat mass (16.9 vs. 17.7 kg), fat-free mass (38.1 vs. 38.4 kg), waist circumference (69.4 vs. 70.3 cm), and hip circumference (97.4 vs. 98.6 cm), with no significant difference observed in the waist-to-hip ratio (0.71 vs. 0.71; p = 0.78). Discussion: Although statistically significant, changes in body weight, body composition, and fat mass were modest for women during their freshman year of college. These results do not support the purported freshman 15 weight gain publicized in the popular media.

Adapting Victorian Gypsies for the Screen: Ethnicity, Otherness and (In)visibility in Neo-Victorian Popular Film

This paper aims at analysing the presence of gypsy characters in two neo-Victorian popular films, namely Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman (2010) and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011). The cultural construction of nineteenth-century gypsies, those “Others within Europe” (Boyarin 433) whose presence in Victorian fiction was peripheral, spectral and at times invisible (Nord 3-4), is simultaneously exploited and contested by these two neo-Victorian screen narratives to raise issues of otherness and invisibility on the screen. Setting off from the premise that screen texts, just like print texts, can also be participant in the neo-Victorian project of reimagining the underside of Victorian culture for contemporary audiences (Whelehan 273), this paper traces how the adaptation of Victorian gypsies for the screen, true to the palimpsestuous potential inherent to the process of adaptation (Hutcheon 6) and sharing the double drive between past and present which characterises the neo-Victorian genre (Arias and Pulham xiii; Shiller 539), hybridises our cultural memory of the Victorian Age on the screen while concurrently raises concerns over the persistent liminal status of gypsies in contemporary European culture. In particular, this paper illustrates how the tropes prototypically associated to gypsies (namely their nomadic lifestyle, mysticism, alienated existence or their perceived association to criminality) which can be traced back to Victorian culture are deployed on the neo-Victorian popular screen (with varyingly succesful outcomes) to comment on their (in)visibility in the European popular imagination.

How does ‘Newstainment’ actually work? : ethnographic research methods and contemporary popular news

Much debate has taken place recently over the potential for entertainment genres and unorthodox forms of news to provide legitimate – indeed democratized – in-roads into the public sphere. Amidst these discussions, however, little thought has been paid to the audiences for programs of this sort, and (even when viewers are considered) the research can too easily treat audiences in homogenous terms and therefore replicate the very dichotomies these television shows directly challenge. This paper is a critical reflection on an audience study into the Australian morning “newstainment” program Sunrise. After examining the show and exploring how it is ‘used’ as a news source, this paper will promote the use of ethnographic study to better conceptualize how citizens integrate and connect the increasingly fragmented and multifarious forms of postmodern political communication available in their everyday lives.

Children's Fiction About 9/11: Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities

In this study, Lampert examines how cultural identities are constructed within fictional texts for young people written about the attacks on the Twin Towers. It identifi es three significant identity categories encoded in 9/11 books for children:ethnic identities, national identities, and heroic identities,arguing that the identities formed within the selected children’s texts are in flux, privileging performances of identities that are contingent on post-9/11 politics. Looking at texts including picture books, young adult fiction, and a selection of DC Comics, Lampert finds in post-9/11 children’s literature a co-mingling of xenophobia and tolerance; a binaried competition between good and evil and global harmony and national insularity; and a lauding of both the commonplace hero and the super-human. The shifting identities evident in texts that are being produced for children about 9/11 offer implicit and explicit accounts of what constitutes good citizenship, loyalty to nation and community, and desirable attributes in a Western post-9/11 context. This book makes an original contribution to the field of children’s literature by providing a focused and sustained analysis of how texts for children about 9/11 contribute to formations of identity in these complex times of cultural unease and global unrest.

Less popular but more democratic? Corrie, Clarkson and the dancing Cru

The central cultural experience of modernity has been change, both the ‘creative destruction’ of existing structures, and the growth, often exponential, of new knowledge. During the twentieth century, the central cultural platform for the collective experience of modernising societies changed too, from page and stage to the screen – from publishing, the press and radio to cinema, television and latterly computer screens. Despite the successive dominance of new media, none has lasted long at the top. The pattern for each was to give way to a successor platform in popularity, but to continue as part of an increasingly crowded media menu. Modern media are supplemented not supplanted by their successors.

Media Studies: "Media, History and Society", and "Thinking Popular Culture".

“When cultural life is re-defined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.” (Postman) The dire tones of Postman quoted in Janet Cramer’s Media, History, Society: A Cultural History of US Media introduce one view that she canvasses, in the debate of the moment, as to where popular culture is heading in the digital age. This is canvassed, less systematically, in Thinking Popular Culture: War Terrorism and Writing by Tara Brabazon, who for example refers to concerns about a “crisis of critical language” that is bothering professionals—journalists and academics or elsewhere—and deplores the advent of the Internet, as a “flattening of expertise in digital environments”.