“Pop-” & “Post-” E-Book

Alessia Polatti

• Herausgeber: Aras Edizioni
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

This book aims at investigating the evolution of English culture and literature in the contemporary society through a Cultural Studies perspective devoted to the analysis of literary texts, pop music, TV shows and series, comics, videogames, and advertisements. The book’s approach denounces the use of arbitrary definitions in terms of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in a post-modern society, as well as any kind of cultural and identity discrimination. In this context, the Cultural Studies perspective makes popular culture a liberating practice in which meaning is not imposed but continually negotiated. Similarly, the current post-modern, post-national, and post-human society creates new paradigms and forms of cultural exchange and debate.

Leseprobe

edited by Alessia Polatti and Roberta Zanoni

“Pop-” & “Post-”

Contemporary Routes in English Culture

Rewind

Studi culturali britannici e angloamericani - British and Anglo-American Cultural Studies

Curatori della collana: Alessandra Calanchi, Jan Marten Ivo Klaver, Federica Savini

Comitato scientifico: Maurizio Ascari (Università di Bologna); Stephen Knight (University of Melbourne); Ilaria Moschini (Università di Firenze); Massimiliano Morini (Università di Urbino); David Levente Palatinus (University of Ružomberok, Slovakia); Valerio Viviani (Università della Tuscia)

TUTTI I DIRITTI RISERVATI

Vietata la riproduzione anche parziale

© Aras Edizioni 2023

ISBN 9791280074768

ISSN 26113406

© Coordinamento grafico di Jonathan Pierini

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redazione: via Mura Sangallo 24, 61032 Fano (PU)

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INDICE

INTRODUCTION. POP CULTURE IN A POST-WORLD

alessia polatti, roberta zanoni

1. VIRGINIA WOOLF’S STARDOM: APPROPRIATION AND MANIPULATION ON THE WEB

1.1. Introduction

1.2. A Name to Praise

1.3. Woolf the Influencer in the Age of Vintage

2. MASS (CULTURAL) EFFECT. POPULAR CULTURE, THE LITERARY CANON, AND THE QUEST FOR THE SUPREMACY OF WESTERN CULTURE IN THEMASS EFFECT TRILOGY

luisa signorelli

2.1. Introduction

2.2. Repurposing Erudition: Literary Afterlives in Outer Space

2.3. “Shakespeare in the Voice of Elcor”: Bardolatry as a Galactic Phenomenon

2.4. A Threshold of Civilisation: Human Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism

2.5. Conclusions

3. POP SHAKESPEARE IN ADVERTISING

roberta zanoni

3.1. Introduction

3.2. What Shakespeare?

3.3. Advertising and Culture

3.4. Shakespeare and Advertising Communication

3.5. Case Studies

3.5.1. The Shakesbeer

3.5.2. Stella Artois

4. POST-ALICE: FROM WONDERLAND TO THE LABYRINTH, PASSING THROUGH A CULTURAL LOOKING GLASS

roberta de tomi

4.1. Introduction

4.2. Alice and Adaptation

4.2.1. Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

4.2.2. Alice in the Labyrinth: Between Love and Freedom

4.2.3. Novels Inspired by Carroll’s Alice: English Language Books

4.2.4. Italian Language Books

4.3. Alice Through the Screen

4.3.1. “Něco z Alenky”: the Czech Adaptation

4.3.2. Alice in Wonderland: Tim Burton Meets Disney

4.3.3. Alice Through the Looking-Glass

4.3.4. Tim Burton: His The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy

4.4. Alice and Music: Stilness, a Rapper in Wonderland

4.5. Conclusion

5. REWRITING THE CLASSICS: GRAY’SPOOR THINGSAS A MULTIMODAL AFTERLIFE OF MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN

alberta boschi

5.1. Introduction

5.2. On Rewriting and Adaptation

5.3. Intertextual Allusions and Hybridization in Poor Things

5.4. Paratextual Rewriting and National Appropriation

5.5. Rethinking the Novel for the Screen: Self-Rewriting as Adaptation

5.6. Conclusion

6. PLASTIC TIMELESSNESS INTHE RIME OF THE MODERN MARINER

manuel zaniboni

6.1. Introduction

6.2. Graphic Representation of the Environment

6.3. Plastic

6.4. The Rime of the Modern Mariner and the Challenges Towards Eco-Graphic Awareness

6.5. A Formal Study

6.6. Conclusion

7. THE POP STAR’S IMAGERY IN RECENT POSTCOLONIAL FICTION

alessia polatti

7.1. Introduction: a Pop Intermedial Insight into Postcolonial Fiction

7.2. Pop and Intermedial References in The Buddha of Suburbia

7.3. A Cathartic Shake: Pop Culture and Rock Music inThe Ground Beneath her Feet

7.4. The Mistreatment of Fame Between Genuineness and Pop Neo-colonialism inSwing Time

7.5. Conclusion

8. “UNTIL THE MAINSTREAM BEGAN TO ABSORB WHAT WAS ONCE RADICAL”: ASSIMILATION AND DISRUPTION IN CALL ME BY YOUR NAMEAND GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER

alice parrinello

8.1. Introduction

8.2. Call Me By Your Name

8.3. Girl, Woman, Other

8.4. Conclusion

9. SISSY THAT TALK! RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE, ONLINE VIRALITY AND CARTOON SERIES

davide passa

9.1. Introduction

9.1.1. Aims and Methodology

9.1.2. Tools

9.2. Drag Queens: a Definition

9.3. Drag Lingo

9.4. Towards Mainstreaming

9.4.1. Commodification

9.4.2. Spreadable Catchphrases

9.4.3. Web

9.5. Linguistic Analysis

9.6. Catchphrases

9.6.1. No tea, No Shade

9.6.2. Let’s Get Sickening!

9.6.3. Halleloo

9.6.4. Throw Shade

9.6.5. Yas

9.6.6. Realness

9.6.7. Sissy That Walk!

9.6.8. Lip-sync for Your Life! / Sashay Away! / Shanté, You Stay!

9.7. RPDRin Audio-Visual Products

9.7.1. The Simpsons - Werking Mom!(S30E7, 2018)

9.7.2. Linguistic Analysis

9.8.Drag Tots (2018)

9.8.1. Linguistic Analysis

9.9.Super Drags(2018)

9.9.1. Linguistic Analysis

9.10. Conclusions

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

10. TRANSLATION AND CENSORSHIP: FOCUSING ON ITALIAN AUDIOVISUAL TRANSLATION AND THE RENDITION OF GAYSPEAK

rocca floriana renna

10.1. Introduction

10.2. Italy and Audiovisual Translation: From the Fascist Era Until the Present Day

10.3. Gayspeak, “the Idiolect of a Speech Community”

10.4. It Is NotOkay to Be Gay: Queerness and the Italian Tv Adaptation of Xena: the Warrior Princess and Gilmore Girls

10.5. Translating Queerness Nowadays: the Adaptation of Gayspeak in Will&Grace – The Revival

10.6. Conclusions

11. EVELYNWAUGH’SDECLINEANDFALLANDVILEBODIES INFRANCO’SSPAINANDCOMMUNISTROMANIA

cristina zimbroianu

11.1. Introduction

11.2. Historical Context in Spain and Romania

11.3. Critical Reception of Decline and FallandVile Bodiesin Spain During the Francoist Period

11.4. Spanish Censors’ Reception of Decline and Fall

11.5. Spanish Censors’ Reception of Vile Bodies

11.6. Critical Reception of Decline and Falland Vile Bodiesin Romania During the Communist Period

11.7. Romanian Censors’ Reception of Decline and Fall

11.8. Romanian Censors’ Reception of Vile Bodies

11.9. Conclusion

12. BREAKDANCING AND POP COMMUNISM IN ROMANIA: AVATARS OF ENGLISH POP CULTURE DURING THE 1980s

alexandra bardan

12.1. Introduction

12.2. Alternative Spaces of Pop Culture

12.3. Globalization, Cultural Industries, and Cultural Identity in Socialist Romania

12.4. Electrecord – a Tradition of Cover Songs of Western Hits

12.5. Breakdancing on Informal Scenes

12.6. Breakdancing on Formal Scenes

12.7. Conclusions: Pop Communism as a Form of Modern Socialist Entertainment

biographies of the authors

INTRODUCTION. POP CULTURE IN A POST-WORLDalessia polatti, roberta zanoni

Since their first appearance in the 1970s, Cultural Studies have aimed at proposing a new approach for the investigation of different fields of knowledge, far from any kind of boundaries and categorizations. This approach is also connected to the denunciation of arbitrary definitions in terms of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in a post-modern and post-national society, and to any form of cultural identity expressed, not only but also, by pop-culture. In this context, the relevance given to the post-modern deconstruction of narrations and identities, emphasised by many scholars, has led to a plurality of significant readings and a multiplicity of discourses, veritable milestones from the post-structural to the post-national and post-colonial perspectives (see Spence [1982], Anderson [1990], Bhabha [1990], Young [1990], Schafer [1992], Gilroy [1993]).

The concept and the role of the prefix “post-” has been discussed and developed in a huge variety of diverse scenarios of meanings. The Cultural Studies perspective insists on its positive value as producer of knowledge and meaning in a de-centred panorama, as asserted by Stuart Hall (1992). Indeed, the ideological struggles carried out throughout the 1970s in such sites as the Birmingham School for Cultural Studies have now been stabilized into “a different type of project: the full scale reconstruction of liberalism on terms appropriate to late capitalist social relations” (Katz 1997: 3). Nowadays, the interest in the topics of diversity, inclusion, and identity demonstrates a greater degree of openness in most of the contributions related to Cultural Studies than would have been some years ago, when the pressure to bring the field firmly into the conceptual landmarks, provided first by Althusser and then by Gramsci, imposed on Cultural Studies a degree of rigidity (McRobbie 1992: 724). The current cultural turn, instead, clears the way to a sort of post-era: this means that the beginning of an innovative age, where the opportunities for a pluralist open-mindedness are strengthened rather than weakened, may be now within reach. As a result, the advent of a post-structuralist and post-national cultural turn is on its way. For Michael Ryan, the usefulness of the category of culture in this context is that it breaks down boundaries between ideality and materiality, between “rhetoric” and “reality”, the traditional idea of “culture” and of what is considered “extra-cultural” (1989: 8). By contrast, the poststructuralist approach to culture thus places a

positive emphasis on popular forces and on the potential of popular struggles. And it can be extended to the cultural sphere. Rather than being understood simply as an instrument of hegemony, cultural forms can be read as sites of political difference, where domination and resistance, the resistance to the positive power of the dispossessed […], and the threat of reversed domination, that is the potential force of the dispossessed, meet. (Ibidem: 19)

Even post-modern philosophical and theoretical categories and presuppositions have been essential to the constitution of what can be called “mainstream” Cultural Studies nowadays. If it is possible to consider postmodernism as consisting of all those discourses and practices governed by the assumption that reality is constituted by an unbounded plurality of heterogeneous forms, Cultural Studies, hence, can be part of such a categorization. The innovative post-era which is now nearby can be constituted by competing positions which can communicate to each other and function to reproduce those areas of knowledge and practice governed by the presupposition and privileging of heterogeneity. In fact, the legitimation and hegemony of postmodern Cultural Studies within the arena of the cultural critique depends upon the existence of a range of contending positions which “average out” in “the long run” (Katz 1997: 15): in other words, the “post-disciplinary location of culture studies that they [scholars] celebrate allows the academy to provide a space for radical discourses without any pressure to transform the existing disciplinary structure” (Ibidem: 16). Within this framework, it is also possible to see that the “differences” or pluralized “identities” privileged by postmodern Cultural Studies support the segmentation of “heterogeneous” sections of the global system. Thus, Cultural Studies support the idea that a new mode of universality can be produced on the basis of a conscious realization of the collectivization of social relations.

The prevailing tendency in the actual cultural turn is therefore the replacement of classes by “identities” as the agents of social transformation. The social identities most often evoked in postmodern Cultural Studies are in particular those articulated around the categories of race, gender, and sexuality, and they are the products of the representation of new forms of collective power which take shape in late capitalism. With the entrance of previously excluded groups or classes into the economic and cultural institutions of the capitalist order of the postcolonial era, categories such as “female” and “black” cease to be merely the signs marking the subordination of groups designated as “inferior” or “external” to the social order. Rather, these categories take on a new meaning, representing the demand that outmoded forms of authority are eliminated in the interest of democratizing all social relations. However, this transformation, if it is not resituated within a global analysis, tends to reproduce those same categories which the struggles for the identity recognition have problematized. Cultural Studies have never superseded this contradiction, which is why, as it is evident in Stuart Hall’s narratives, each new “identity” or “issues” confronted by Cultural Studies (feminism, race, the linguistic turn, etc.) has induced a “crisis” which brings this contradiction to the fore. Furthermore, “such crisis, instead of enabling a sustained critique of the basic assumptions of cultural studies, instead reinforces the hegemony of the culturalist or experiential pole of cultural studies” (Katz 1997: 9). Thus, it is desirable to celebrate a veritable cultural turn which is in the process of becoming an ethnography of identities, with a return to the practices initiated by Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy and Speaking to Each Other (1957), in which the working class, with the aid of popular culture, carries on a fundamental role.

Therefore, the replacement of “class” by “identity” and “ideology” by “culture” is the centre of a postmodernist and post-national conceptualization of culture, as well as the essential approach assumed by the present volume. Postmodern and mainstream popular culture and Cultural Studies can be considered an emergent institutional and cultural form which facilitates the required (post)liberal modifications of pedagogical and other institutions. Its “post-disciplinarity” corresponds to the postmodern liberal politics of identity, which requires modes of knowledge “flexible” enough to manage the contradictions of post-welfare state capitalism. This claim, however, should not be read as supporting the existing intellectual divisions and segmentation of fields as they are, but it should support an innovative and “pop” categorization of disciplines and knowledge under the sign of inclusion.

The concept of “pop,” introduced by the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and John Fiske, is more concerned with “how meanings, such as those drawn from popular culture offerings, are interpreted and used in everyday life” (Fowles 1996: xv). The Cultural Studies perspective frees popular culture from ideological constraints by making it a liberating practice in which meaning is not imposed but continually negotiated. The concept of “pop” is more concerned with people’s everyday life and experience and the reference is to a culture that comes from the people and is destined to the people (Brandt and Clare 2018: x). Research in this field features “an emphasis on subcultures and countercultures, audience reception theory and media studies” (Ibidem). Popular culture is considered as a unifying cultural practice shared by a large group of people, constantly changing, depending on historical and social factors: it “refers to the beliefs and practices, and the objects through which they are organized, that are widely shared among the population” (Mukerji and Schudson 1991: 3).

Popular culture often works through stereotyping processes of “selection, magnification and reduction” (Medhurst 1998: 315). Stereotypes and shared ideas form a popular kind of “knowledge” which stems from media, memories, and popular practices as well as from lived experience. When concentrating on pop culture a twofold perspective is to be adopted: both the construction and reception of meaning have to be taken into consideration, in the light of the fact that “one apprehends reality only through representations of reality, through texts, discourses, images” (Dyer 2002: 3). In the contemporary mass media saturated scenario people’s perception of reality is often constructed and negotiated. It can be said that mass media have become a lens through which people perceive the world and the reality which surrounds them: the media give audiences a language which inevitably shapes their thoughts. Meaning and identities are constructed via popular culture which “is a source of both meaning and the meaning-making tools people use to think and speak with” (Sherwin 2000: 18). In this sense, popular culture contributes to the production of culture as well as to its understanding along with that of the social and political practices which produce it (Brandt and Clare 2018: 4).

Culture absorbs the main trends of the reality it is immersed in, it records people’s tastes and desires, and re-presents them to the audience in a new mediatised light:

Culture is a living, active process: it can be developed only from within, it cannot be imposed from without or above. […] Popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry. All the culture industries can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of people to use or to reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture. (Fiske 1989: 23, 24)

The reference is to a culture that comes from the people, but which can, at the same time, influence and intertwine with the so-called “high-culture”. As a matter of fact, an opposition of a popular against an elite culture still holds in the debate on popular culture: “culture is sometimes subdivided into such categories as high and low, on the basis of preferences within the system that are associated with differences in established aesthetic canons, social class, education, and other variables within the community” (Danesi 2019: 2). Even the Journal of Popular Culture in a 2020 editorial still underlines the distinction between popular and elite culture, differentiating between popular culture’s democratic approach which respects the people as “popular culture producers and consumers” (Larabee 2020: 988) as opposed to “the persons who, and domains that, have removed themselves from the realm of popular culture [...] [i.e.] the world of elites” (Ibidem).

Danesi actually postulates the presence of three levels of popular culture, “high, mid, and low”, while also stressing the instability of the levels and the possibility of a “constant crisscrossing” of products of popular culture among them. Thus, a popular cultural product can acquire, from time to time, different values and move from a level to another. However, studies in the field of popular culture are trying to transcend the idea of a clear-cut divide between high and low:

the sense that certain forms of culture are higher than others has not disappeared from modern societies [...] Paradoxically, the idea of levels exists within pop culture itself. We all share a sense of an implicit culture hierarchy (which is judged in an intuitive rather than formal or critical way). (Danesi 2019: 6)

Although this hierarchy is still intuitively perceived, also an “admixture of styles and forms” (Ibidem) from the different levels is typical of pop culture and, paradoxically, it is the disregard for these distinctions that is at the core of popular cultural productions.

In the latter period, indeed, also a new perspective on culture has been introduced. The clear-cut division between high and low has started to fade away and a new form of hybrid culture has been born from the interaction of different cultural productions: “pop culture alludes, essentially, to a form of culture that makes little, if any, such categorical distinctions” (Ibidem: 2). Intertextuality, multimediality and the influence of the world wide Web have made this phenomenon possible: “Pop culture has itself been instrumental in blurring, if not obliterating, the distinction between high and low culture” (Ibidem: 6). Thus, although an intuitive division between high and low, popular and elite might still be perceived, pop culture is currently proving the frailty of this divide and the inclusivity of the popular cultural field.

As the most recent studies on pop culture maintain, theory in the field of popular culture

is chosen to illuminate the artifact, rather than vice versa. A work of popular culture scholarship begins with the artifact, whether it is a television show, a song, a celebrity, a movie, a performance, a consumer object, a comic book, or a romance novel. Nothing is unworthy of study, and [...] popular culture is all-inclusive. (Larabee 2020: 987)

In addition, popular culture blends the material and imaginative dimensions, it is focused on commodities but also on “the study of people, their rituals, beliefs, and the objects that shape their existence. More than just products or media texts, popular culture represents the people, power and politics that shape our daily existence” (Brandt and Clare 2018: 8). At the same time popular culture also expresses people’s fantasies, it gives life to collective dream worlds (Storey 2015) as well as articulating “in a disguised form, collective (but repressed) wishes and desires” (Ibidem).

This volume spans from literature to linguistics, from novels and their revisions to advertising and reality shows, in order to underline the power of popular culture of embracing contemporary trends. It concerns all aspects of people’s lives and the influence they might have on the shaping of people’s consciousness and their language, as long as showing how popular culture is representative of the trends in contemporary society as well as being capable of mirroring the most disparate aspects of people’s everyday life.

Moreover, the present volume intends to investigate the evolution and the contemporary role of the concepts of “post” and “pop”. The relevance of the prefix “post” from a Cultural Studies perspective insists on its positive value as producer of knowledge and meaning in a de-centred scenario. The concept of “pop” is more concerned with the influence of popular culture on everyday life. The reference is to a culture that comes from the people, and to the obliteration of hierarchical distinctions in culture.

All the chapters show particularly fruitful avenues of enquiry in this direction. In “Virginia Woolf’s Stardom: Appropriation and Manipulation on the Web”, Cristina Carluccio deals with the process of celebrification of writers of the past by analysing Virginia Woolf’s role in popular culture. In particular, she brilliantly considers different contexts of the World Wide Web where Woolf seems to have been recognised as an intriguing source of attraction – e.g. the Facebook group “What would Virginia Woolf do?”, and websites selling products named after Woolf herself. Nevertheless, Woolf’s dissemination via these virtual materials rarely consists in a simple circulation of Woolf’s persona, but it rather oscillates between the appropriation and the manipulation of her image and name. Death and drama act as two essential catalysts in the persistence of Woolf’s fame in the popular realm, thus revealing misfortune as stardom’s best ally. However, the process of celebrification can also produce benefits. By participating in discourses which are not exclusively literary, the chances of Woolf being discovered and appreciated by people unfamiliar with her increase. As a modern pop star, she is able to reach and attract disparate individuals throughout the globe, to the extent that her variegated “appearances” on the web become “embodiments of the medium itself”.

A reflection on the impact of Western literature on the contemporary popular cultural scenario is carried out by Luisa Signorelli in “‘Mass Culture Effect’: Science Fiction, Classical English Literature and the Quest for the Human Cultural Supremacy”, in which she speaks of the Mass Effect trilogy (2007-2012) – a series of sci-fi role-playing games developed by Canadian BioWare. Signorelli takes into consideration the role of classical English literature in the Mass Effect videogame trilogy. The works by Shakespeare, Hobbes, Tennyson, and Fleming are projected in the imaginary future of the multi-species galaxy. Signorelli skilfully reflects on how these references, quotations, adaptations and appropriations contribute to shaping the cultural identities of the various characters and the atmospheres of the games, suggesting how canonical literature can become for science fiction a source of legitimation, an instrument of self-definition and possibly a means of challenging notions of high and low culture. Signorelli underlines how the video games reveal the Western cultural supremacy, a “Western-focused conception of cultural prestige” which has imposed also in an imagined universe in which even aliens are fascinated by the human’s literary canon. Signorelli also dwells on one of the symbols of Western culture, William Shakespeare, and his reception and appropriation by alien cultures in the games, which “deliberately blurs the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, with the twofold effect of sarcastically attaching ‘kitsch’ to traditional Shakespearean performance and legitimising the video game pastiche as the ‘new’ path to Bardolatry”.

Roberta Zanoni too, in her “Pop Shakespeare in Advertising”, reflects on the consideration reserved to Shakespeare in the contemporary popular culture scenario and on how Shakespeare and his plays are popularised through advertising. Zanoni takes into account the development of a popularised image of Shakespeare in the eyes of contemporary audiences and how this image, and the ideas related to the plays, have been used by advertising in the last decades. Zanoni highlights how the field of advertising, only lately acquiring some interest in the eyes of critics of popular culture, can in all respects be analysed along with other popular cultural phenomena, and, in particular, how it can adapt and appropriate Shakespeare the cultural icon. She does so by focusing on two advertisements: the Shakesbeer one, which plays on some distinctive traits of the figure of Shakespeare derived from canonical representations of the Bard; and the Stella Artois one, which plays on mechanisms of recognition of famous lines of Shakespeare’s plays which arrive to the contemporary audiences through traditional as well as popular mediations.

In line with the idea of adaptation and re-writing, Roberta De Tomi’s “Post-Alice: from Wonderland to the Labyrinth, Passing Through a Cultural Looking-glass” gives an overview of contemporary American and British re-writings of Carroll’s novels in different media, then to discuss her own novel Alice nel labirinto [Alice in the Labyrinth] (2017) the story of a grown-up Alice, in search for freedom and love. De Tomi underlines the indebtedness of her novel with Carroll’s Alice as well as the influence of other popular culture products on her writing: “the looking-glass will thus be seen as a surface that allows not only a passage of texts and ideas, but also of some cultural traits that still persist in our contemporary era, making the Victorian Alice live again, albeit in a new way”.

Alberta Boschi focuses on intertextuality and on the idea of adaptation in literary rewritings as a new form of writing, as well as a form of translation in which cultural, linguistic, and media issues intertwine. Boschi reiterates the concept, taken from Benjamin, that the new text, the adaptation, can be considered as the afterlife of the original. In this sense, Boschi, implies that Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) can be viewed as the afterlife of Frankenstein as its protagonist is a renewed version of Frankenstein’s monster. Boschi also underlines the nature of the rewriting as a form of cultural appropriation connected with the Scottish identity. The process of adaptation does not only concern the content of the book but also its paratexts, and, in particular, the frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Shelley’s Frankenstein, in line with popular cutlure’s tendency to deem the material object as a more and more noteworthy objects of study. Boschi also calls attention to the way in which rewriting and adaptation reach extreme complexity when Alasdair Gray adapts his own novel for the screen, “renewing his original text and rethinking its content for a global audience”.

Manuel Zaniboni introduces another level of popular adaptation concerning the passage from literature to graphic novels, influenced by real-life news. “Plastic Timelessness in The Rime of the Modern Mariner” talks about Nick Hayes’s graphic novel The Rime of the Modern Mariner, whose author was prompted to write his story by the photos he saw of a dead albatross with plastics in its entrails shot by Chris Jordan. Hayes was thus inspired for his adaptation of S. T. Coleridge’s lyrical ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This type of adaptation does not only display the typical principle of intertextuality characteristic of contemporary popular culture, but it also reveals the intertwining of different genres which also highlights the non-hierarchical configuration of popular culture today. The adaptation also shows the impact of popular culture on themes which characterise the contemporary era such as sustainability and the “semantics of the prefix ‘post’ related to plastic ontology”. The chapter shows how everyday life and socio-environmental issues intertwine with fictional works and how fictional endeavours can channel contemporary concerns and thus engage in the fight against pollution and climate change, providing a socio-political take on the contemporary everyday life.

In “The Pop Star’s Imagery in Recent Postcolonial Fiction”, Alessia Polatti explores the intertextual and intermedial references and the influence of the pop stars’ imagery in postcolonial fiction by Hanif Hureishi, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith. Contemporary mass-media indisputably influence the perception of the world and of human relationships. Postcolonial fiction has investigated such a condition by highlighting the possible impacts of some pop media on our lives, especially of music. Songs, novels, movies, and TV shows from the 1970s to the present becomes, therefore, sources of inspiration for the main characters of the postcolonial novels. The “pop” habitat in which they live, surrounded by references to white British and American culture, influences the life choices of the protagonists – migrants of first or second generation with Indian, Pakistani, or Jamaican origins – thus enquiring problems of inclusion and racial diversity in-between high and pop culture.

Sexual diversity is at the core of “Until the Mainstream Began to Absorb What Was Once Radical”: Assimilation and Disruption in Call Me By Your Name and Girl, Woman, Other, where Alice Parrinello considers the practice of homonormativity to describe contemporary normalizing practices involving the LGBTQ+ community. This trend has heavily influenced a variety of cultural products; homonormativity in contemporary fiction is mostly an uncharted territory and the few studies on the topic generally focus on white cisgender gay men. Consequently, her contribution offers an innovative and intersectional income by presenting a close reading of Call Me By Your Name (2007) by André Aciman and Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernardine Evaristo. The chapter inquires to what extent these narratives follow a homonormative paradigm, which results into the characters’ assimilation to heteronormative society and downplaying of the disruptiveness of queerness. Parrinello also argues that ultimately what defines assimilationism and the belonging to a post-gay society is the involvement of the characters of the novels with the larger LGBTQ+ community and its history.

In “SISSY THAT TALK! RuPaul’s Drag Race, Online Virality and Cartoon Series”, Davide Passa deals with the creation, through the successful RuPaul’s Drag Race – an American reality programme in which the contestants are all drag queens – of a specific language, which has passed from being subcultural to becoming mainstream. Passa’s essay does not only reflect on the establishment of a slang mediated via popular culture but also shows the vicinity of the mediatised culture with that of the market since it describes the process of commodification undergone by the drag queens whose persona is used to advertise and sell products and services. The drag queens become icons of popular culture, thus comparable to products sold via the programme they are part of. Passa shows how the process of commodification passes through language, which is used to create a reality show persona through easily recognisable catchphrases which are in their turn infinitely repeated, and which have become part of the contemporary slang thanks to the popularity of Rupaul’s programme. Passa conducts his linguistic analysis of the frequency of some selected occurrences in online texts through Google Trends and WebCorp – Birmingham Blog Corpus and, in addition, also presents the intertextual diffusion of what has become a trend in mainstream cartoon series, such as The Simpsons, Drag Tots, and Super Drags, thus showing “how queer reception has changed in the last twenty years, and the influence of RPDR’s language on mainstream culture”.

An attempt to censor controversial cultural products has always been present in every society, and the last chapters of the volume deal with this tendency. In “Translation and Censorship: Focusing on Italian Audiovisual Translation and the Rendition of Gayspeak”, Floriana Renna analyses the strategies used by Italian adaptors in translating specific cultural references in some TV series of 1990s and 2000s. The aim is to understand if any improvement can be detected in the adaptation of references to homosexuality and sexuality over the years. Terms such as ‘censorship’ and ‘manipulation’ are often considered as interchangeable, almost overlapping. The latter may not have an entirely negative connotation since it is the result of technical considerations, even though it can also be linked to influence and control unfairly exerted. Censorship goes beyond, since it suppresses information but also decides how to deal with the values and morals of the culture of the source text. However, also linguistic constraints and general expectations on style, form, and content may require manipulation of the target text, and the chapter explores these different scenarios.

The fil rouge of censorship is followed also in “Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies in Franco’s Spain and Communist Romania”. Cristina Zimbroianu studies and compares the reception of two of Waugh’s novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, in two countries governed by totalitarian regimes – Franco’s Spain and communist Romania – where culture was controlled by severe censorship systems. The research conducted at the General Archive of the Administration in Alcalá de Henares and the National Archives of Romania in Bucharest shows that the reception of Waugh’s novels in both countries was conditioned by the censorial apparatus.

The importation of audio-visual and cultural products and the action of censorship are at the core also of the last chapter, “Breakdancing and Pop Communism in Romania: Avatars of English Pop Culture during the 1980s”, where Alexandra Bardan focuses on the subversive potential of foreign mainstream cultural products in favour of the right to free expression and free information. The contribution analyses how transnational media appear as key players contributing to the emergence, during the 1980s, of a dynamic alternative media market in communist Romania. Engaging in various cultural practices, local communities exchanged a broad range of cultural and informational products through networks that bypassed the official market via informal channels of production, import, and distribution. These strategies, on the one hand, identified specific manufacturers and brands. On the other hand, the author assesses the configuration of an imported Western pop culture, where references to the English culture within the fields of music and movies are particularly relevant.

The chapters in the present book show not only how research into Cultural Studies is alive and well, but also how timely and cutting-edge it is. All contributions engage in interdisciplinary work, mobilising such disciplines and fields as literature, music, TV shows and series, comics, videogames, and advertisements, as well as media studies, translation studies, and politics. The interdisciplinary nature of the essays brings up interesting questions on how English Studies and Culture are evolving and on what it means to carry out research in this field: how much should we rely on distinctions among areas and methodologies? These issues resonate with the themes discussed in the book, since denouncing arbitrary definitions of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in a post-modern society is, indeed, one of the main topics of debate.

The chapters of the volume exemplary demonstrate what working from a cultural perspective means: giving relevance to the historical, political, and social context, as well as to a series of ethical and educational questions is part of a cultural state of mind that privileges also an interdisciplinary methodology. The present book aims at demonstrating that it is possible to connect different disciplines and different temporal and spatial settings, in order to carry out a sort of “therapeutic” approach that allows people to openly discuss the divisive issues that affect the contemporary society1.

references

Althusser, L., “Sur la révolution culturelle”, Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes, 14, 1966, pp. 5-16.

Anderson, B., Imagined Communities, Verso, New York 1990.

Bhabha, H., “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”, in H. Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration, Routledge, London 1990.

Bhattacharya, B., and N. Srivastava, The Postcolonial Gramsci, Taylor&Francis, London 2012.

Brandt, J., and C. Clare, An Introduction to Popular Culture in the US: People, Politics, and Power, Bloomsbury, New York and London 2018.

Danesi, M., Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York, London 2019.

Dyer, R. (ed), “Introduction”, in The Matter of Images, Routledge, London 2002.

Fiske, J., Understanding Popular Culture, Routledge, London 1989.

Fowles, J., Advertising and Popular Culture, Sage, London 1996.

Gilroy, P., The Black Atlantic, Cambridge UP, Cambridge 1993.

Hall, S., “Gramsci and Us: Hard Road to Renewal”, in M. James (ed), Antonio Gramsci, Routledge, London 2002, pp. 227-238.

Hall, S., “The question of cultural identity”, in S. Hall, D. Held, and T. McGrew (eds), Modernity and its futures, Polity Press - The Open University, London 1992.

Hoggart, R. (1957), The Uses of Literacy and Speaking to Each Other, Routledge, London 1998.

Katz, A., “Postmodern Cultural Studies: A Critique”, Cultural Logic, 1997, pp. 1-25.

Larabee, A., “Redefining Popular Culture After Ray Browne Roundtable”, The Journal of Popular Culture, 53.5 (2020).

McRobbie, A., “Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies: A Postscript”, in L. Grossberg et al. (eds), Cultural Studies, Routledge, New York 1992, pp. 719-730.

Medhurst, A., “Tracing desires: sexuality in media texts”, in A. Briggs and Cobley P. (eds), The Media: an Introduction, Pearson Education Limited, Harlow 1998, pp. 315-325.

Mukerji, Ch. and Schudson, M., Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, University of California Press, Berkeley 1991.

Ryan, M., Politics and Culture, John Hopkins UP, Baltimore 1989.

Schafer, R., Retelling a Life: Narration and Dialogue in Psychoanalysis, Basic Books, New York 1992.

Sherwin, R., When Law Goes Pop, The University of Chicago Press 2000.

Spence, D., Narrative Truth and Historical Truth, Norton & Co, New York 1982.

Storey, J., Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, Routledge, London 2015.

Young, R., White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, Routledge, London 1990.

1 We would like to thank ESU Verona for having funded the volume. Thanks a lot also to the young researchers and university students who have contributed to the project with their essays and ideas.

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S STARDOM: APPROPRIATION AND MANIPULATION ON THE WEB

cristina carluccio

Introduction

The celebrification of literary figures has long offered up personalities to be admired, with the consequence however that they are frequently distorted, even as they are exalted, since they are always susceptible to various forms of reception and reproduction. Celebrification has succeeded in creating a controversial bridge between high and low culture: by uprooting authorial agency from an intellectual sphere, celebrification has positioned it on a popular spectrum composed of unpredictable shades.

‘High’ modernism constituted a hegemonic phase for the culture of celebrity. Aaron Jaffe (2005) identifies an important intersection between literary modernism and popular culture in which “the elite promotion of authorial originality meets with the mass phenomenon of celebrity” (Ibidem: 88). Far from being disinterested in the masses, several modernist writers subtly participated in the popular world, since modernism also “made selective use of popular forms and had its own popular ambitions” (Ibidem). Indeed, a manifestation of the celebrification of modernist writers can be seen precisely in their own promotional acts as authors, and recognition of this has helped to finally destroy the notion of modernism as being completely detached from mass culture.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) herself, one of the most renowned British writers of the twentieth century, engaged with popular culture during her lifetime. Her involvement in this sphere has become increasingly dominant since her death, leading to her transformation into a true icon in the second half of the mid-twentieth century (Silver 1999a: 8). As such, Woolf cannot be identified with her profession and writings alone but must be viewed through the lens of a popular ‘heritage’ that manifests itself in an array of contexts and forms. Brenda Silver (1999b) argues that Woolf’s “proliferation and diversity become one with the connections, disjunctions, juxtapositions, and interactions that characterize the web”. The cyber world is thus the ideal context in which to examine a popular Woolf, who moreover clearly diverges from the one described in the academic sphere:

I believe these web sites provide a way for many Woolf fans to connect with images of Woolf that the literary academy does not provide. And many of us in the academy might chorus, “and with good reason.” Clearly, the Virginia Woolf who emerges from the two-million-plus hits is not always the Woolf of the Academy. (Wood 2008: 23)

Whatever the differences, Jane Wood (2008) believes that “both the popular and the intellectual” sphere contain “Woolf’s legacies” (Ibidem: 22). Paula Maggio (2010) reduces the distance between the two realms and proposes a “more democratic and inclusive” consideration of the internet with regard to our understanding of Woolf (Ibidem: 215), as it also provides scholars with numberless resources for study and research1.

This chapter intends precisely to analyse Woolf’s presence on the web in order to shed additional light on the ways in which she is therein perceived and disseminated. Investigating Woolf’s presence in the cyber world is prompted by the massive contemporary use of the internet as a place of encounter and dialogue, but it also represents an attempt to explore the borderless influence that Woolf continues to exert over the public – regardless of its literary interests, geographical position, and cultural background. The analysis will focus on Woolf’s association with two woman-oriented Facebook groups (and relative websites), a site marketing a make-up product, and a hairstyling tutorial on YouTube and will be conducted in the light of two processes that frequently characterise Woolf’s dissemination in the popular world, i.e. appropriation and manipulation2. The former, “meaning ‘to make one’s own’, is the act of taking something for your own use, usually without permission” (Santos 2020: 29)3. While basing itself on appropriation as its sine qua non, manipulation goes further, implying modification of whatever/whomever has been appropriated. Being coexistent and not always intentional, the two processes are not always easily distinguished, and the reasons for their occurrence are not always easily identified.

Fundamentally however, a subject’s appropriation and manipulation are likely to arise from the needs and tastes of the popular sector where that subject is disseminated. The fact that no “possession or property ownership” (Ibidem: 31) is required for appropriation – and therefore manipulation – is also a crucial aspect, especially with regard to celebrities such as Woolf and platforms such as the internet. Information on celebrities circulates freely in several domains of the web, making those figures highly vulnerable to appropriation and similar processes and increasing the risk of them falling under the control of others.

In this sense, a veiled discourse of power can also be identified. Appropriation has long been defined in purely cultural terms: there is a tension between the notion “of an enriching transformation by exchange of cultural elements, values, customs, practices & ideas” and the belief that an “imbalance of power […] still remains between cultures” (Ibidem: 29). The latter position is reinforced by evidence of manipulation which is manifested on the cultural scene in the form of “‘dominance’” and is aimed at a “subordinated culture” (Ibidem).

The power dynamics observed in the cultural debate are partially replicated in the dissemination of celebrities in the popular world. Woolf’s appropriation – and, possibly, manipulation – is usually driven by the desire for empowerment that derives from dealing with her. Indeed, dissemination via appropriation requires somebody or something that might ensure success in the popular realm. Hence, whereas there is no clear ‘subordination’ of Woolf (such as may happen to a colonised community), some control is however exerted over her, since she can neither prevent nor direct the advancement of her own popularisation. As will be observed, Woolf’s presence on the internet is subject to kinds of dissemination that variously take advantage of her appeal, those responsible similarly regarding her as a sort of guarantee of their own success.

A Name to Praise

Woolf’s stardom has placed her in the foreground of multiple popular spheres, thereby providing inspiration for further forms of appropriation and manipulation of her persona. In some sectors, moreover, Woolf has been able to unintentionally act as a guide for those individuals who have started to see her as a model for their own lives. “The contemporary Virginia Woolf”, states Caroline Marie (2015-2016: 95), “has become a narrative inspiring young women readers to self-discovery and independence”. This is a path that even users who have never read any writing by Woolf may take, albeit differently. Clearly, whether the exchanges develop into a dialogue or not, the anonymity offered by the World Wide Web makes the path easier, as it protects users’ identities. Woolf is thus transformed into “a personal friend, one whom a young girl can ask even the most intimate of questions and receive a warm and personal response” (Wood 2008: 23). She can also become “an astrological instrument of self-introspection” for users participating in online astrological discourse (Carluccio 2021: 238). “Feelings of sympathy and identification” animate them as they try to “establish an astral connection with Woolf” while pondering the dramatic traits of her life and personality (Ibidem: 241). But the digitally disseminated Woolf also appears as a woman who fights for women, believing in their strength and ability to overcome numberless restrictions4, precisely because she herself had to rebel against several limitations while trying to defeat the phantasms of her own mind5.

It is perhaps in the light of Woolf’s passionate interest in women’s concerns and everyday troubles that we should read the appropriation of her name in the Facebook group “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?”6. Created by Nina Lorez Collins in 2015, this online community was such a success that three years later Collins published a book based on it entitled What Would Virginia Woolf Do? And Other Questions I Ask Myself As I Attempt to Age Without Apology7. The emphasis on Woolf’s name in “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?” suggests the essential role played by the writer in the group. The term “Woolfers” – as the group’s members called themselves – further reinforces this idea, suggesting people who somehow recall Woolf, her thought and her writings in their posts and chats. However, this is not the case, and Collins’s appropriation of Woolf’s name is unjustified, in spite of Collins’s declared admiration for the writer’s feminist ideas (Maggio 2018). Indeed, as Penelope Green (2018) writes in her article in TheNew York Times, “a fairly typical middle-aged malaise” was the event that pushed Collins towards the creation of the group. Collins conceived it as a corner of cyberspace where women over 40 like her – she was 48 at the time – could support and help one another by “talk[ing] about things they didn’t want to share with husbands, partners or children” (Green 2018). In effect, “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?” is truly able to reunite a large number of women around topics that reflect common experiences. Themes tackled in the group include “Recommendations for restaurants, hotels”, but also “teenagers, college tours” (Maggio 2018), along with very delicate topics such as “suicide ideation […] and children suffering from drug addiction” (Green 2018). Reading suggestions are also proposed, but Woolf does not receive much attention even in this regard (Maggio 2018). She is thus banished to the dark corners of the group, mentioned briefly and rarely in spite of her prominence in the community’s name. As Green (2018) reports, the name was actually suggested by one of Collins’s friends: “How about What Would Virginia Woolf Do? one friend joked darkly, because of course what Woolf did, at 59, was kill herself”. Whether Woolf’s suicide is really what persuaded Collins to accept her friend’s advice is unknown, as is the reason why Collins describes the group’s name as “‘ironic’” (Maggio 2018).

Clearly, when creating “the Woolfer” (i.e. the successor to “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?”), Collins did not contemplate the possibility of removing the unjustified reference to Woolf. The website called “the Woolfer”, which also acts as a Facebook group, still claims Woolf’s nominal participation, while doubtlessly creating a link with the first group via its members, who were called precisely Woolfers. On “the Woolfer” Facebook page, posts announce the “Woolfer of the week”, interviews on Zoom or Instagram are shared, suggestions for travelling during the pandemic are provided, and so on. These few thematic instances show how “the Woolfer” replicates “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?”, including the rather limited involvement of Woolf.

Collins’s decision to appropriate Woolf’s name for her online women’s communities did not go unnoticed, however. In her Blogging Woolf, while discussing “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?” and the relative book, Paula Maggio (2018) writes: “I have to wonder what Woolf would do if she saw either one. […] I know I’m mortified for her”. Referring to Collins and her book, she adds: “she owes Woolf a huge apology for using her name to sell this cheap work. Why? Because it reflects the sad shallowness of pop culture, not Woolf” (Ibidem). That observation prompts us to reflect not only on Woolf’s incomprehensible treatment in Collins’s groups, but also on the risks inherent in the popular treatment of celebrities, namely the distortion of what they were before becoming famous8. “What Would Virginia Woolf Do?” is actually more about the appropriation of Woolf’s name rather than a manipulation of her persona. However, it is precisely this appropriation that enables the manipulation of the community’s possible members. Indeed, as Maggio (2018) suspects, it is very likely that Woolf’s name is used as ‘clickbait’. Woolf’s involvement might be expected to increase the number of members, and hence, for the book, the number of buyers. Implicit in this process is the creator’s assumption that midlife women will be intrigued by the group’s reference to Woolf, who doubtlessly dominates the mainstream as a talented writer and an unconventional woman, but also as a mentally ill person and a suicide victim. One of the effects of Woolf’s stardom is precisely the incomplete – in some cases false – information that users with little knowledge of Woolf may acquire from non-academic or non-literary sources. There is a “cultural construction known as Virginia Woolf” (Marie 2021: 231) that reverberates through the world and is particularly successful in spawning alternative approaches to the writer, such as those enabled by the cyber world. Obviously, the web represents a context where users can encounter Woolf very easily. The problem is that the convenience offered by the internet collides at times with the profusion of inaccurate information that users may inadvertently absorb.

This subtle but frequent risk is exemplified by vipfaq.com. This website contains coloured boxes, each regarding a different aspect of Woolf’s life, personality and habits. Normal information – e.g. Woolf’s date of birth – coexists with very peculiar topics, such as her hypothetical drug consumption. Curiously enough, all the themes are presented under the guise of survey results, which are in turn accompanied by the exact score gained by each option. For instance, regarding Woolf’s sexual orientation, users are asked to choose between “gay”, “straight” or “bi”. The request is not surprising, considering that “Woolf is one of the twentieth century’s best-known lesbians” (Barrett 1977: 3). Nevertheless, the webpage does not ask users to share knowledge, but rather urges them to “feel free to tell us what you think”. This invitation confirms the subjectivity of the data regarding Woolf’s sexuality and, consequently, the entire webpage, making the site utterly unreliable even for common users.