Poetics最新文献

Understanding macro-level trends in the entertainment industry is vital to the advancement of mass communication theories. The current paper works towards this end by providing a representative layout of genre patterns across the film industry. We analyze 9,068 films released from 1997 to 2017, and examine genre in terms of success, co-occurrence, release, and production. Consistent with past work, results highlight differences between genres that garner popularity (e.g., Action) and acclaim (e.g., Drama). Moreover, we found four unique genre clusters within our data indicating that specific genres tend to be featured together more frequently than others (e.g., Adventure, Animation, Family, Fantasy, and Musical). We also demonstrate which genres have had increased (e.g., Adventure), decreased (e.g., Comedy), and consistent (e.g., Thriller) production across the 20-year span. Finally, we found differential release patterns across the calendar year, such that popular genres (e.g., Science Fiction) are frequently released during Summer and acclaimed genres (e.g., Biography) are frequently released during Fall and Winter. Taken together, the findings describe the mass-market film landscape and demonstrate variance in the production and appeal of different genres over time. Thus, these data can serve as a first step toward studying how the entertainment industry influences and reacts to audiences’ media preferences.

This paper bridges scholarship on events with that on metaphors, positing metaphors as a proxy for competing “forms of eventfulness.” Focusing specifically on the “wave” metaphor, I draw from 471 Governor's Covid-19 Briefing transcripts across ten governors—five Democratic, five Republican—from the year 2020 to identify two competing forms of eventfulness with respect to the Covid-19 pandemic. As I show, using both discourse analytic techniques and simple text counts, Democratic governors take up the “wave” metaphor to present what I call “cascading” eventfulness, defined by multiple conditional moments of rupture, or “waves.” In contrast, Republican governors largely avoid the “wave” metaphor to present what I call “calamitous” eventfulness, defined by a singular, decisive moment of rupture. I conclude with a discussion of how my findings contribute to scholarship on eventfulness and political ideology.

Israeli rappers often feature vulnerability in their texts and performances. In so doing they deliberately challenge a long tradition of hyper-masculinity in both hip hop and Israeli culture. This strategic deviation, I claim, enables Israeli rappers to exhibit a sense of authenticity and hence to claim legitimate participation in the global field of hip hop which sacralizes the ethos of “being real.” In examining texts produced by two generations of Israeli rappers I will illuminate the negotiations whereby global stylistic tropes acquire original local meanings. It is argued that while cross-cultural dialogue has the capacity to destabilize gender regimes at the local level, new perceptions of masculinity generate artistic intertextuality that is the infrastructure of cultural globalization.

Over the past few decades, quantitative research on musical tastes and consumption has extensively relied on methods involving music genre labels. These methods generally assume participants to share a general and common label knowledge. However, such an assumption has not been empirically tested to date. The present study aimed to (a) estimate adolescents’ ability to identify music genres and (b) examine the influence of social factors on this ability. Results indicated that genre identification constituted a rather difficult task for a majority of participants. They also showed that genre identification depended on social class, age, musical background, and, to a lesser extent, on sex and the importance attached to music. All in all, the study findings further pinpoint the flaws pertaining to genre-based methods and invite sociology researchers to use complementary indicators of musical tastes in the future.

In this paper, we present a study of non-linearity in storytelling in a collection of 2,348 books published since 2001 that are divided among 10 different categories. We employ word embeddings to capture the semantic non-linearity of a book, along with three associated measures called speed, volume, and distance. We find that narrative non-linearity is strongly associated with the communication of non-instrumental (imaginary) information, but only very weakly negatively associated with a book's success. When we decompose non-linearity, we observe that reader preferences for books favor greater narrative distance with lower speed, i.e. books that take readers further but do so more parsimoniously are more successful. Our work aims to contribute to a growing body of studies that use computational methods to better understand human narrative behavior.

This article aims to advance research on interaction rituals (IR) and technology. Its starting point is interaction ritual theory, a key micro-sociological approach that postulates IRs as the micro-interactional glue that holds social life together. This approach sees IRs as requiring bodily co-presence among interactants, thus casting doubt over the ritual potential of technology-mediated interaction. In recent years, however, studies have begun problematizing this view through investigations of technology-mediated IRs (TMIR). Counter to IR theory, these studies show that IRs can take place in lieu of bodily copresence and that technologies offer new opportunities for and create distinctively novel forms of rituals and communities. Crucially, however, this emerging literature has an under-theorized understanding of user-technology relationships, which leaves significant gaps in our understanding of IRs and technology. To advance the field, it is suggested that future research should consider: a broader ecology of technologies; heterogeneous users, uses, and circumstances; cultural coding and domestication; and the technologies of face-to-face interaction. This can facilitate a more fundamental reappraisal of the relationship between IRs and technology, which, in turn, can improve our understanding of both TMIR and IR more generally.

In understanding the role of temporal variables such as age and generation in shaping aesthetical tastes, existing studies draw no clear boundaries between various theoretical pathways. This article attempts to address this issue through an age–period–cohort (APC) analysis to understand how life course, generational location, present-time dynamics, and cultural/economic capital jointly shape cultural practices in contemporary urban China. Undertaking a multilevel modeling exercise, our study showed that the effects from the age, period, and cohort were all significant in determining cultural engagement and expenditure. The APC effects represented independent causal pathways involving individual life-cycle dynamics, the democratization of affordable leisure activities, and a cohort-level hysteresis of habitus represented by a taste for necessity formed during China's communist times. The role of these temporal variables seemed far more than secondary, yet they may be conceived as more of a renewal of the structural homology thesis than an invalidation of it.

Media effects research has established a positive relationship between media and news consumption and political action—a “more-more” pattern. This paper identifies a coexistent “more-less” pattern in which more political engagement on social media is associated with limited political behavior offline. Traditional approaches that treat media behavior as an independent variable and political behavior as dependent miss this finding. Instead, this paper treats configurations of media and political behavior as styles, identified through latent class analysis (LCA). The data come from an original survey of American citizens about their encounters with political content on social media, their media habits, and their online expression of political attitudes to assess whether and how these media behaviors undermine their political and civic engagement offline. The latent class analysis of these data reveals three styles, which we label “actives,” “passives,” and “armchair citizens” (i.e., more-less). We then seek to make sense of this armchair citizen style—who would choose this style of media and political participation? An LCA regression model predicting membership into the armchair citizen class suggests that armchair citizen style is associated with experiencing what Giddens’ called “ontological insecurity.”

How do intermediaries affect cultural production in the age of platformized gatekeeping? Cultural production increasingly depends upon digital infrastructures known as platforms (e.g., Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, et al.) for distribution. These infrastructures supposedly diminish the importance of conventional, non-infrastructural intermediaries, yet cultural production's platformization occurred alongside the emergence of new downstream intermediaries. Here, I show how the practices of YouTube content creators reflect direct instructions from both the platform (primary gatekeeper) and a downstream intermediary (an MCN). Producers no longer require non-platform intermediaries for access to markets, and so, rather than acting as gatekeeper, non-platform intermediaries support the platform. The MCN aids the platform by propagating platform conventions and an orientation toward metrics and algorithms among content producers. This differs markedly from conventional sociological theories of cultural production which presume intermediaries as autonomous organizations that reproduce and mediate social conventions of cultural production (i.e., genre, roles, etc.). Thus, under conditions of platformization, both intermediaries and producers appear subordinate to infrastructure.

Black newspapers have historically played an important role within the African American community, reaching preeminence during the World War II era. Embodied in the Double V Campaign, they sought victories for democracy both at home and abroad. In analyzing two different types of cartoons—etiquette cartoons and political cartoons—present within a local Black newspaper during the war and post-war period, this analysis illustrates how World War II-era Black newspapers informed racial formation processes at multiple levels by targeting structural inequalities and advising interpersonal behavior. Specifically, these cartoons prescribed behaviors for public conduct, child rearing, and gender/sexual relations upheld by respectability politics. Such esthetic and discursive mechanisms illuminate the structural and ideological terrains constituting the Black counterpublic as well as guideposts for challenging and navigating the dominant racial discourse.