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Fredric Wertham And The Critique Of Mass Culture
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Book Synopsis Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture by : Bart Beaty
Download or read book Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture written by Bart Beaty and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a re-examination of the critic whose Congressional testimony sparked the Comics Code. Bart Beaty traces the evolution of Wertham's attitudes toward popular culture and reassesses his place in the debate about pop culture's effects on youth and society. When The Seduction of the Innocent was published in 1954, Wertham (1895-1981) became instantly known as an authority on child psychology. Although he had published several books before Seduction, its sharp criticism of popular culture in general--and comic books in particular--made it a touchstone for debate about issues of censorship, child protection, and freedom of speech. This book reinterprets his intellectual legacy and challenges notions about his alleged cultural conservatism. Drawing upon Wertham's published works as well as his unpublished private papers, correspondence, and notes, Beaty reveals a man whose opinions, life, and career offer more subtlety of thought than previously assumed. In particular, the book examines Wertham's change of heart in the 1970s, when he began to claim that comics could be a positive influence in American society.
Download or read book Demanding Respect written by Paul Lopes and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From pulp comics to Maus, the story of the growth of comics in American culture.
Book Synopsis Comic Book Nation by : Bradford W. Wright
Download or read book Comic Book Nation written by Bradford W. Wright and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-10-17 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of comic books from the 1930s to 9/11.
Book Synopsis Seduction of the Innocent by : Fredric Wertham
Download or read book Seduction of the Innocent written by Fredric Wertham and published by Main Road Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Wertham was senior psychiatrist for the Department of Hospitals in New York City. This book, thoroughly documented by facts and cases, gives the substance of Dr. Wertham's expert opinion on the effects that comic books have on the minds and behavior of children who come in contact with them. Reprint of the 1954 edition with a new comprehensive Introduction by James E. Reibman, Ph.D.
Book Synopsis Seal of Approval by : Amy Kiste Nyberg
Download or read book Seal of Approval written by Amy Kiste Nyberg and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1998 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The content of comic books has been governed by an industry self-regulatory code adopted by publishers in 1954 in response to public and governmental pressure. This book, the first full-length study of this period of comic book history, examines the reasons that comic books were the subject of heated controversy. In tracing the evolution of the controversy and the resulting code, Seal of Approval shows that the comic book has yet to achieve legitimation as a unique form of expression appreciated by readers of all ages.
Book Synopsis The Ten-Cent Plague by : David Hajdu
Download or read book The Ten-Cent Plague written by David Hajdu and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-02-03 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s, the popular culture of today was invented in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. But no sooner had comics emerged than they were beaten down by mass bonfires, congressional hearings, and a McCarthyish panic over their unmonitored and uncensored content. Esteemed critic David Hajdu vividly evokes the rise, fall, and rise again of comics in this engrossing history. "Marvelous . . . a staggeringly well-reported account of the men and women who created the comic book, and the backlash of the 1950s that nearly destroyed it....Hajdu’s important book dramatizes an early, long-forgotten skirmish in the culture wars that, half a century later, continues to roil."--Jennifer Reese,Entertainment Weekly(Grade: A-) "Incisive and entertaining . . . This book tells an amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book’s imagination."--Janet Maslin,The New York Times "A well-written, detailed book . . . Hajdu’s research is impressive."--Bob Minzesheimer,USA Today "Crammed with interviews and original research, Hajdu’s book is a sprawling cultural history of comic books."--Matthew Price,Newsday "To those who think rock 'n' roll created the postwar generation gap, David Hajdu says: Think again. Every page ofThe Ten-Cent Plagueevinces [Hajdu’s] zest for the 'aesthetic lawlessness' of comic books and his sympathetic respect for the people who made them. Comic books have grown up, but Hajdu’s affectionate portrait of their rowdy adolescence will make readers hope they never lose their impudent edge."--Wendy Smith, Chicago Tribune "A vivid and engaging book."--Louis Menand,The New Yorker "David Hajdu, who perfectly detailed the Dylan-era Greenwhich Village scene in Positively 4th Street, does the same for the birth and near death (McCarthyism!) of comic books inThe Ten-Cent Plague." --GQ "Sharp . . . lively . . . entertaining and erudite . . . David Hajdu offers captivating insights into America’s early bluestocking-versus-blue-collar culture wars, and the later tensions between wary parents and the first generation of kids with buying power to mold mass entertainment."--R. C. Baker,The Village Voice "Hajdu doggedly documents a long national saga of comic creators testing the limits of content while facing down an ever-changing bonfire brigade. That brigade was made up, at varying times, of politicians, lawmen, preachers, medical minds, and academics. Sometimes, their regulatory bids recalled the Hays Code; at others, it was a bottled-up version of McCarthyism. Most of all, the hysteria over comics foreshadowed the looming rock 'n' roll era."--Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times "A compelling story of the pride, prejudice, and paranoia that marred the reception of mass entertainment in the first half of the century."--Michael Saler,The Times Literary Supplement(London) David Hajdu is the author ofLush Life: A Biography of Billy StrayhornandPositively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.
Book Synopsis The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder by : Robert Corn-Revere
Download or read book The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder written by Robert Corn-Revere and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the nineteenth century with Anthony Comstock, America's 'censor in chief,' The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder explores how censors operate and why they wore out their welcome in society at large. This book explains how the same tactics were tried and eventually failed in the twentieth century, with efforts to censor music, comic books, television, and other forms of popular entertainment. The historic examples illustrate not just the mindset and tactics of censors, but why they are the ultimate counterculture warriors and why, in free societies, censors never occupy the moral high ground. This book is for anyone who wants to know more about why freedom of speech is important and how protections for free expression became part of the American identity.
Book Synopsis Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media by : Siân Nicholas
Download or read book Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media written by Siân Nicholas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The media have always played a central role in organising the way ideas flow through societies. But what happens when those ideas are disruptive to normal social relations? Bringing together work by scholars in history, media and cultural studies and sociology, this collection explores this role in more depth and with more attention paid to the complexities behind conventional analyses. Attention is paid to morality and regulation; empire and film; the role of women; authoritarianism; wartime and fears of treachery; and fears of cultural contamination. The book begins with essays that contextualise the theoretical and historiographical issues of the relationship between social fears, moral panics and the media. The second section provides case studies which illustrate the ways in which the media has participated in, or been seen as the source of, the creation of threats to society. Finally, the third section then shows how historical research calls into question simple assumptions about the relationship between the media and social disruption.
Book Synopsis Under the Strain of Color by : Gabriel N. Mendes
Download or read book Under the Strain of Color written by Gabriel N. Mendes and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Under the Strain of Color, Gabriel N. Mendes recaptures the history of Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a New York City institution that embodied new ways of thinking about mental health, race, and the substance of citizenship. The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, the writer Richard Wright, and the clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic emerged in the context of a widespread American concern with the mental health of its citizens. Mendes shows the clinic to have been simultaneously a scientific and political gambit, challenging both a racist mental health care system and supposedly color-blind psychiatrists who failed to consider the consequences of oppression in their assessment and treatment of African American patients. Employing the methods of oral history, archival research, textual analysis, and critical race philosophy, Under the Strain of Color contributes to a growing body of scholarship that highlights the interlocking relationships among biomedicine, institutional racism, structural violence, and community health activism.
Book Synopsis Superheroes: An Analysis of Popular Culture's Modern Myths by : David Reynolds
Download or read book Superheroes: An Analysis of Popular Culture's Modern Myths written by David Reynolds and published by Problematic Press. This book was released on 2011-04-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A semiotic and cultural anthropological interrogation of popular North American superhero narratives, such as those of Superman, Spider-Man, and Batman, provides insight into how media’s messages influence the culture’s ethical values. Since emerging in the late 1930s, the superhero has become a pervasive figure in North American popular culture. As an extension of ideas presented by Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Campbell, and Umberto Eco, this dissertation argues that superhero tales must be regarded as modern mythology. It follows that people observe and learn social norms of justice from such narratives, since these ideals are intrinsic to the tales. In investigating the superhero’s role as a contemporary figure of myth, this project focuses primarily on three areas: an account of the history of the superhero from 1938 to present; an examination of the cultural functions of contemporary superhero narratives; and, an interrogation of vigilantism, responsibility, and justice in these narratives and how those concerns further relate to ideologies and practices in North American culture.
Book Synopsis Superheroes and American Self Image by : Michael Goodrum
Download or read book Superheroes and American Self Image written by Michael Goodrum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of comic-books, mobilising them as a means to understand better the political context in which they are produced. Structured around key political events in the US between 1938 and 1975, the author combines analyses of visual and textual discourse, including comic-book letters pages, to come to a more complete picture of the relationship between comic-books as documents and the people who read and created them. Exploring the ways in which ideas about the US and its place in the world were represented in major superhero comic-books during the tumultuous period of US history from the Great Depression to the political trauma of Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War, Superheroes and American Self-Image sheds fresh light on the manner in which comic-books shape and are shaped by contemporary politics. As such it will appeal to scholars of cultural and media studies, history and popular culture.
Book Synopsis A Cycle of Outrage by : James Gilbert
Download or read book A Cycle of Outrage written by James Gilbert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1988-10-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The youth culture is on everyone's lips today, as pressures build to ban controversial song lyrics, reintroduce school prayer, and prohibit teenagers' access to contraceptives. It's not the first time Americans have been outraged over the seuction of the innocent.. When James Dean and Marlon Brando donned their motorcycle jackets and adopted alienated poses in Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, and The Wild One, in the 1950's, so did countless numbers of American teenagers. Or so it seemed to their parents. American teenagers were looking and acting like juvenile delinquents. By mid-decade, the nation had reached a pitch of near obsession with the harmful effects of film, radio, comic books, and television on American youth. Experts across the land denounced mass culture as depriving young people of their innocence and weakening their parents' hold on them. By the end of the decade, the obsession had ended, although the actual numbers of juvenile delinquents had apparently risen. A Cycle of Outrage explores the 1950's debate over the media and juvenile delinquency among parents, professionals, and the creators of mass culture themselves. In this groundbreaking study, James Gilbert sees the attempt to blame the media as part of a larger reaction of discomfort echoed in recent debates over censorship. The book examines how the central phenomena of the 1950's--the development of youth culture and the rise of a mass media society--became intertwined and confused and argues that young people ceased to be a threat as they were recognized to be a market.
Book Synopsis The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s by : Mariah Adin
Download or read book The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s written by Mariah Adin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What caused four recently bar mitzvahed middle-class youths to go on a crime spree of assault and murder in 1954? This book provides a compelling narrative retelling of the boys, their crimes, and a U.S. culture obsessed with juvenile delinquency. After ongoing months of daily headlines about gang shootouts, stomp-killings, and millions of dollars worth of vandalism, by the summer of 1954, America had had enough of juvenile delinquency. It was in this environment that 18-year-old Jack Koslow and the other three teenage members of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers committed their heinous crimes and achieved notoriety. The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s exposes the underbelly of America's mid-century, the terrible price of assimilation, the uncomfortable bedfellows of comic books and juvenile delinquency, and the dystopia already in bloom amongst American youth well before the 1960s. Readers will be engrossed and horrified by the tale of the Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang whose shocking, front-page story could easily have been copy-pasted from today's online news sites. Author Mariah Adin takes readers along for a breathtaking moment-by-moment retelling of the crime spree, the subsequent interrogations, and the dramatic courtroom showdown, interspersed with expository chapters on juvenile delinquency, America's Jewish community in the post-Holocaust period, and the anti-comics movement. This book serves to merge the history of juvenile delinquency with that of the Great Comic Book Scare, highlights the assimilation of immigrants into America's white mainstream gone wrong, and complicates our understanding of America's "Golden Age."
Book Synopsis The Superhero Reader by : Charles Hatfield
Download or read book The Superhero Reader written by Charles Hatfield and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-06-14 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, superheroes are only recently starting to attract sustained scholarly attention. This groundbreaking collection brings together essays and book excerpts by major writers on comics and popular culture. While superhero comics are a distinct and sometimes disdained branch of comics creation, they are integral to the development of the North American comic book and the history of the medium. For the past half-century they have also been the one overwhelmingly dominant market genre. The sheer volume of superhero comics that have been published over the years is staggering. Major superhero universes constitute one of the most expansive storytelling canvases ever fashioned. Moreover, characters inhabiting these fictional universes are immensely influential, having achieved iconic recognition around the globe. Their images and adventures have shaped many other media, such as film, videogames, and even prose fiction. The primary aim of this reader is twofold: first, to collect in a single volume a sampling of the most sophisticated commentary on superheroes, and second, to bring into sharper focus the ways in which superheroes connect with larger social, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and historical themes that are of interest to a great many readers both in the academy and beyond.
Book Synopsis The Origins of Comics by : Thierry Smolderen
Download or read book The Origins of Comics written by Thierry Smolderen and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, Thierry Smolderen presents a cultural landscape whose narrative differs in many ways from those presented by other historians of the comic strip. Rather than beginning his inquiry with the popularly accepted "sequential art" definition of the comic strip, Smolderen instead wishes to engage with the historical dimensions that inform that definition. His goal is to understand the processes that led to the twentieth-century comic strip, the highly recognizable species of picture stories that he sees crystallizing around 1900 in the United States. Featuring close readings of the picture stories, caricatures, and humoristic illustrations of William Hogarth, Rodolphe Töpffer, Gustave Doré, and their many contemporaries, Smolderen establishes how these artists were immersed in a very old visual culture in which images--satirical images in particular--were deciphered in a way that was often described as hieroglyphical. Across eight chapters, he acutely points out how the effect of the printing press and the mass advent of audiovisual technologies (photography, audio recording, and cinema) at the end of the nineteenth century led to a new twentieth-century visual culture. In tracing this evolution, Smolderen distinguishes himself from other comics historians by following a methodology that explains the present state of the form of comics on the basis of its history, rather than presenting the history of the form on the basis of its present state. This study remaps the history of this influential art form.
Download or read book Pulp Empire written by Paul S. Hirsch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-06-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Popular Culture Association's Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Book in Popular or American Culture In the 1940s and ’50s, comic books were some of the most popular—and most unfiltered—entertainment in the United States. Publishers sold hundreds of millions of copies a year of violent, racist, and luridly sexual comics to Americans of all ages until a 1954 Senate investigation led to a censorship code that nearly destroyed the industry. But this was far from the first time the US government actively involved itself with comics—it was simply the most dramatic manifestation of a long, strange relationship between high-level policy makers and a medium that even artists and writers often dismissed as a creative sewer. In Pulp Empire, Paul S. Hirsch uncovers the gripping untold story of how the US government both attacked and appropriated comic books to help wage World War II and the Cold War, promote official—and clandestine—foreign policy and deflect global critiques of American racism. As Hirsch details, during World War II—and the concurrent golden age of comic books—government agencies worked directly with comic book publishers to stoke hatred for the Axis powers while simultaneously attempting to dispel racial tensions at home. Later, as the Cold War defense industry ballooned—and as comic book sales reached historic heights—the government again turned to the medium, this time trying to win hearts and minds in the decolonizing world through cartoon propaganda. Hirsch’s groundbreaking research weaves together a wealth of previously classified material, including secret wartime records, official legislative documents, and caches of personal papers. His book explores the uneasy contradiction of how comics were both vital expressions of American freedom and unsettling glimpses into the national id—scourged and repressed on the one hand and deployed as official propaganda on the other. Pulp Empire is a riveting illumination of underexplored chapters in the histories of comic books, foreign policy, and race.
Book Synopsis Pop Culture Panics by : Karen Sternheimer
Download or read book Pop Culture Panics written by Karen Sternheimer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral panics reveal much about a society’s social structure and the sociology embedded in everyday life. This short text examines extreme reactions to American popular culture over the past century, including crusades against comic books, music, and pinball machines, to help convey the "sociological imagination" to undergraduates. Sternheimer creates a critical lens through which to view current and future attempts of modern-day moral crusaders, who try to convince us that simple solutions—like regulating popular culture—are the answer to complex social problems. Pop Culture Panics is ideal for use in undergraduate social problems, social deviance, and popular culture courses.
