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This volume introduces a new concept that boldly breaks through the traditional dichotomy of high and low culture while offering a fresh approach to both: unpopular culture. From the works of David Foster Wallace and Ernest Hemingway to fanfiction and The Simpsons, from natural disasters to 9/11 and beyond, the essays find the unpopular across media and genres, analysing the politics and aesthetics of a side to culture that has been overlooked by previous theories and methods in cultural studies.
List of contents
Introduction: What is Unpopular Culture? Martin Lüthe & Sascha Pöhlmann Why We Talk the Talk We Talk: On the Emptiness of Terms, the Processual Un/Popular, and Benefits of Distinction-Some Auto-Ethnographical Remarks Martin Butler Big Fish: On the Relative Popularity of Zane Grey and Ernest Hemingway Dominika Ferens How (Not) to Make People Like You: The Anti-Popular Art of David Foster Wallace James Dorson Dissenting Commodities: Negotiations of (Un)popularity in Publications Critical of Post-9/11 U.S.-America Elizabeth Kovach Secrets, Lies and The Real Housewives: The Death of an (Un)Popular Genre Daniel Udy Karaoke Americanism Gangnam Style: K-pop, Wonder Girls, and the Asian Unpopular Jeroen de Kloet & Jaap Kooijman 'When order is lost, time spits': The Abject Unpopular Art of Genesis (Breyer) P-Orridge Florian Zappe 'Famous in a Small Town': The Authenticity of Unpopularity in Contemporary Country Music Christian Schmidt Making Christianity Cool: Christian Pop Music's Quest for Popularity Bärbel Harju Listening to Bad Music: White Power and (Un)Popular Culture C. Richard King Hipster Black Metal? Deafheaven's Sunbather and the Evolution of an (Un)popular Genre Paola Ferrero Unpopular Culture and the American Reception of Tinariwen Barry Shank Cultural Studies and the Un/Popular. How the Ass-Kicking Work of Steven Seagal May Wrist-Break Our Paradigms of Culture Dietmar Meinel Unpopular Sport Teams and the Social Psychology of 'Anti-Fans' Karsten Senkbeil Popular, Unpopular: When WWI Museums Meet Facebook Catherine Buoko Unpopular American Natural Calamities and the Selectivity of Disaster Memory Susanne Leikam The Unpopular Profession? Graduate Studies in the Humanities and the Genre of the 'Thesis Hatement' Sebastian M. Herrmann
About the author
Prof. Dr. Martin Lüthe is an associate professor in North American Cultural Studies at the John-F.Kennedy Institute at Freie University Berlin.
Dr. Sascha Pöhlmann is an associate professor in American Literary History at Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich, Germany.
