NEPCA Publication: Pop Culture Matters

Thanks to the tireless efforts of  Martin F. Norden and Robert E. Weir; they have produced a book of the conference proceedings of the 2017 NEPCA Conference titled:  Pop Culture Matters: Proceedings of the 39th Conference of the Northeast Popular Culture Association.

We are very excited that this has come to fruition and are excited to share it with our community.  We encourage you to check it out, and if possible, request your institutional libraries to purchase a copy.

Also, keep an eye out in the weeks to come for interviews with many of the authors included in this volume.

Here is the book’s description and also the table of contents.

“We immerse ourselves daily in expressions of popular culture—YouTube videos, hip hop music, movies, adverts, greeting cards, videogames, and comics, to name just a few possibilities—and far too often we pay only scant critical attention to them. The essays in this collection redress this situation by probing a wide range of topics within the field of popular culture studies. Written in engaging and jargon-free prose, contributions critically examine various offerings in film, television, social media, music, literature, sports, and related areas. Moreover, they often pay special attention to the ways in which these pop culture artefacts intersect with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ability. Providing a rich mixture of broad perspectives and intriguing case studies, the essays form a compelling mosaic of findings and viewpoints on popular culture. Exploring everything from toxic masculinity in twenty-first century television programmes to gendered greeting cards and adult colouring books, this provocative volume is essential reading for anyone interested in that fabricated and all-pervasive environment we call popular culture.”

Check out interviews with authors in this book:

• Anthony G. Cirilla

• Caroline Kidd

• Cheryl A. Hunter

• James Patrick Carraghan

• Matthew T. Jones

• K. A. Laity

Table of Contents

• Preface: NEPCA and the Ongoing Evolution of Popular Culture Studies by Robert E. Weir

• Introduction: Pop Culture Matters by Martin F. Norden

Part I: Literature

• Chapter One: Disability, Masculinity, and Gender Essentialism in Lady Chatterley’sLover by Victoria Parker

• Chapter Two: The Bunhill Apocalypse: Robert Aickman’s “Larger than Oneself”as a Post-Christian Metaphor by Steffen Silvis

• Chapter Three: “I Don’t Think a Belacani Would Know How to Do It Right”:Cultural Appropriation in Tony Hillerman’s The Ghostway by Eve Kornfeld

• Chapter Four: Corruption of the Innocent in Social Problem Fiction by David A. Rochefort

• Chapter Five: Demythologising the Soldier: An Analysis of Maximilian Uriarte’sThe White Donkey: Terminal Lance by William Price, Jr.

Part II: Fantasy and Horror 

• Chapter Six: From Grimm to Gaiman: Points of Convergence, Divergence,and Departure in The Sleeper and the Spindle by Matthew T. Jones

• Chapter Seven: Bod’s Estrangement and Identity: The Chronotope of The Graveyard Book by Caroline Kidd

• Chapter Eight: Heroes and the Role of Heredity in the Shaping of Identity by Cheryl Hunter

• Chapter Nine: Pretty When She’s Dead: The Aesthetics of Abjection in Anna Dressed in Blood by Nova Seals

Part III: Film Adaptations

• Chapter Ten: Women Adapting Life, Literature, and Film in the 1920s by Alan Robert Ginsberg

• Chapter Eleven: Femme Non-Fatal: Women’s Cooperation in Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s

• The Blank Wall by K. A. LaityChapter Twelve: Entropy, Heat-Death, and Inherent Vice by Gary Vaspol

Part IV: Twenty-First Century Television

• Chapter Thirteen: Greed and Goomahs: Toxic Masculinity in TV’s Second Golden Age by Alexandra M. Lucas

• Chapter Fourteen: Dexter at Home in Suburbia: Domesticated Monster / Ideal Father by Stanley C. Pelkey II

• Chapter Fifteen: Audience Reception of Intersectional Genderbent and Racebent Casting in Elementary by Megan Genovese

Part V: Music Applications

• Chapter Sixteen: All Day in the Trey: DJ Screw, Screwtapes, and the Sonic Representation of Houston Hip Hop Culture by Matthew Kent Carter

• Chapter Seventeen: Joseph Schillinger’s Project for Walt Disney and Disney’s Fantasia: Conflicting Approaches to Mixing “High-” and “Low-Brow” in the Era of Modernism by Jacquelyn Sholes

• Chapter Eighteen: Beating the Odds: Abuela Claudia and Intersectionality in In the Heights by Geraldine Wagner

Part VI: Race and Ethnicity

• Chapter Nineteen: Steel Framed? Steel and the Representation of the Modern BlackSuperhero from Comics to Film by Yann Descamps

• Chapter Twenty: Turkish People’s Perception of “Black” on Turkish Twittersphere by Bilge Narin

• Chapter Twenty-One: Reception of Hindi Films in the United States: Indian Diaspora and Beyond by  Eren Odabasi

Part VII: Gender and Sexuality

• Chapter Twenty-Two: Tackling the Femme: The Psycho-Biddy Genre by James Patrick Carraghan

• Chapter Twenty-Three: Rewriting the Golden Age of Phobia: Prestige Cinema and Historical Queer Rehabilitation by Audrey Jane Black

• Chapter Twenty-Four: Battling for Equality: Sexuality vs. Skill in the UFC by Jennifer Drissel

Part VIII: Popular Culture and Everyday Life

• Chapter Twenty-Five : Adult Colouring Books: Mindful or Mindless? by Terri Toles Patkin

• Chapter Twenty-Six: Exploring the Leisure Gap in Mother’s Day and Father’s Day Cards by Stephanie Kolberg

• Chapter Twenty-Seven: Push Pin Projects (PPPs) in Television and Cinema by Benjamin Lawrance Miller

• Chapter Twenty-Eight: Medieval Philosophy and Saving Fame in the Videogame MediEvil by Anthony G. Cirilla

• Chapter Twenty-Nine: Heroes and Superheroes: Popular Literature in the Writing Studies Classroom by Charlee Sterling

Contributors Index