V for Vendetta as Cultural Pastiche

Author: James R. Keller
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476604975
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
The 2005 James McTeigue and Wachowski Brothers film V for Vendetta represents a postmodern pastiche, a collection of fragments pasted together from the original Moore and Lloyd graphic novel of the same name, along with numerous allusions to literature, history, cinema, music, art, politics, and medicine. Paralleling the graphic novel, the film simultaneously reflects a range of authorial contributions and influences. This work examines in detail the intersecting texts of V for Vendetta. Subjects include the alternative dimensions of the cinematic narrative, represented in the film's conspicuous placement of the painting The Lady of Shalott in V's home; the film's overt allusions to the AIDS panic of the 1980s; and the ways in which antecedent narratives such as Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Huxley's Brave New World, and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 represent shadow texts frequently crossing through the overall V for Vendetta narrative.

The Deep End of South Park

Author: Leslie Stratyner
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786453338
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
No American television show of the past decade has been vilified as has Comedy Central's South Park. This is the show that has featured, in turn, a nine-year-old boy enmeshed in an affair with Ben Affleck, a maniacal Mel Gibson smearing feces everywhere, and the misadventures of Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo, a talking, bouncing, singing piece of poop. While it's not always an exercise in good taste, South Park is a socially significant satire that has also devoted entire episodes to interpretations of Great Expectations, Ken Burns' Civil War, and Hamlet. This volume explores the popularity and cultural relevance of South Park and its place as an artistically and politically worthy satire.

Drawing the Past, Volume 2

Author: Dorian L. Alexander
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496837231
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Contributions by Dorian L. Alexander, Chris Bishop, David Budgen, Lewis Call, Lillian Céspedes González, Dominic Davies, Sean Eedy, Adam Fotos, Michael Goodrum, Simon Gough, David Hitchcock, Robert Hutton, Iain A. MacInnes, Małgorzata Olsza, Philip Smith, Edward Still, and Jing Zhang In Drawing the Past, Volume 2: Comics and the Historical Imagination in the World, contributors seek to examine the many ways in which history worldwide has been explored and (re)represented through comics and how history is a complex construction of imagination, reality, and manipulation. Through a close analysis of such works as V for Vendetta, Maus, and Persepolis, this volume contends that comics are a form of mediation between sources (both primary and secondary) and the reader. Historical comics are not drawn from memory but offer a nonliteral interpretation of an object (re)constructed in the creator’s mind. Indeed, when it comes to history, stretching the limits of the imagination only serves to aid in our understanding of the past and, through that understanding, shape ourselves and our futures. This volume, the second in a two-volume series, is divided into three sections: History and Form, Historical Trauma, and Mythic Histories. The first section considers the relationship between history and the comic book form. The second section engages academic scholarship on comics that has recurring interest in the representation of war and trauma. The final section looks at mythic histories that consciously play with events that did not occur but nonetheless inflect our understanding of history. Contributors to the volume also explore questions of diversity and relationality, addressing differences between nations and the cultural, historical, and economic threads that bind them together, however loosely, and however much those bonds might chafe. Together, both volumes bring together a range of different approaches to diverse material and feature remarkable scholars from all over the world.

V for Vendetta Book & Mask Set

Author: ALAN. MOORE
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1779511736
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In a world without political freedom, personal freedom and precious little faith in anything comes a mysterious man in a white porcelain mask who fights political oppressors through terrorism and seemingly absurd acts. It's a gripping tale of the blurred lines between ideological good and evil. The inspiration for the hit 2005 movie starring Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving, this amazing graphic novel is packaged with a collectable reproduction of the iconic V mask.

Alice in Wonderland in Film and Popular Culture

Author: Antonio Sanna
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031022572
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
This book examines the many reincarnations of Carroll’s texts, illuminating how the meaning of the original books has been re-negotiated through adaptations, appropriations, and transmediality. The volume is an edited collection of eighteen essays and is divided into three sections that examine the re-interpretations of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in literature, film, and other media (including the branches of commerce, music videos, videogames, and madness studies). This collection is an addition to the existing work on Alice in Wonderland and its sequels, adaptations, and appropriations, and helps readers to have a more comprehensive view of the extent to which the Alice story world is vast and always growing.

Dystopian States of America

Author: Matthew B. Hill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440873399
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Book Description
Dystopian States of America is a crucial resource that studies the impact of dystopian works on American society-including ways in which they reflect our deep and persistent fears about environmental calamities, authoritarian governments, invasive technologies, and human weakness. Dystopian States of America provides students and researchers with an illuminating resource for understanding the impact and relevance of dystopian and apocalyptic works in contemporary American culture. Through its wide survey of dystopian works in numerous forms and genres, the book encourages readers to connect with these works of fiction and understand how the catastrophically grim or disquieting worlds they portray offer insights into our own current situation. In addition to providing more than 150 encyclopedia articles on a large and representative sample of dystopian/apocalyptic narratives in fiction, film, television, and video games (including popular works that often escape critical inquiry), Dystopian States of America features a suite of critical essays on five themes-war, pandemics, totalitarianism, environmental calamity, and technological overreach-that serve as the foundation for most dystopian worlds of the imagination. These offerings complement one another, enabling readers to explore dystopian conceptions of America and the world from multiple perspectives and vantage points.

The English Renaissance in Popular Culture

Author: G. Semenza
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230106447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
This book considers popular culture's confrontations with the history, thought, and major figures of the English Renaissance through an analysis of 'period films,' television productions, popular literature, and punk music.

Queers in American Popular Culture

Author: Jim Elledge
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313354588
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 990

Book Description
This three-volume collection of essays reveals the widespread existence of queer men and women in American popular culture, and showcases their important yet little-known role in shaping our society over the last 120 years. The virtually unknown existence of gay, bisexual, and queer men and women in American popular culture from the late 1800s through the present day is a fascinating topic for many readers, regardless of their own orientation. Whether it's the father of bodybuilding, famous closeted entertainers or sports stars, or the leading characters in current television shows and films, queer men and women have changed the face of American popular culture and society for over a century. Ironically, most of the fascinating information, anecdotes, and revealing facts about well-known figures in American culture are virtually unknown to the typical U.S. citizen. Elledge's Queers in American Popular Culture covers a wide variety of historical and current topics that documents how the queer community has been—and continues to be—one of the most significant shapers of American popular culture. Currently, no other book covers queer topics in American popular culture as broadly as this text.

Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture

Author: Jan-Noël Thon
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803277202
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 554

Book Description
It has become something of a cliché within the field of narratology to assert the commercial, aesthetic, and sociocultural relevance of narrative representations, but the fact remains that narratives are everywhere. Whenever we read a novel or a comic, watch a film or an episode of our favorite television series, or play the latest video game, we are likely to engage with narrative media. Similarly, the intermedial adaptations and transmedial entertainment franchises that have become increasingly visible during the past few decades are, at their core, narrative forms. Since a significant part of contemporary media culture is defined by the narratives we tell each other via various media, the media studies discipline needs a genuinely transmedial narratology. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture focuses on the intersubjective construction of storyworlds as well as on prototypical forms of narratorial and subjective representation. It provides not only a method for the analysis of salient transmedial strategies of narrative representation in contemporary films, comics, and video games but also a theoretical frame within which medium-specific approaches from literary and film narratology, from comics studies and game studies, and from various other strands of media and cultural studies may be employed to further our understanding of narratives across media. Jan-Noël Thon is a research associate in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He is the coeditor of a number of books on narrative and media studies, including From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative and Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Nebraska, 2014).

Magic Words

Author: Lance Parkin
Publisher: Aurum
ISBN: 1781311463
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
For over three decades comics fans and creators have regarded Alan Moore as a titan of the form. With works such as V for Vendetta, Watchmen and From Hell, he has repeatedly staked out new territory, attracting literary plaudits and a mainstream audience far removed from his underground origins. His place in popular culture is now such that major Hollywood players vie to adapt his books for cinema. Yet Moore's journey from the hippie Arts Labs of the 1970s to the bestseller lists was far from preordained. A principled eccentric, who has lived his whole life in one English town, he has been embroiled in fierce feuds with some of the entertainment industry's biggest corporations. And just when he could have made millions ploughing a golden rut he turned instead to performance art, writing erotica, and the occult. Now, as Alan Moore hits sixty, it's time to go in search of this extraordinary gentleman, and follow the peculiar path taken by a writer quite unlike any other.