CMNS 110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Working Class Culture, French Fries, Richard Hoggart
10 Dec 2015
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Document Summary
Leisure activities become commodities as society sees a transformation from the production of entertainment to consumption of entertainment. Mcluhan showed that criteria used in the study of art and literature could be applied successfully to analysis of so-called popular arts such as advertising, comic books, magazines, films, and television. Semiotics and in particular, barthes" 1957 book mythologies: french fries, greta garbo, wrestling, einstein"s brain, soap, photography. Popular: of the people (denotation, mass of people (connotation, this second, connotative meaning leads to notions of popular being defined as base, vile, riff-raff, common, low, vulgar, plebian, cheap. Popular can mean something negative: (the too popular argument) appreciated appreciated. A current pop star can be popular. (synchronic- one moment in time, currently in style: on the other hand, it refers to a timeless range of practises that are related to a particular domain of the social order. Long dead pop stars can be popular- despite being dead. (diachronic- over time)
