Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction

Very interesting read and served as a great contextualizer. Its coverage is broad, touching upon everything from the British traditions, Structuralism, Marxism, Post-modernism, to discourses on Power, Gender and Sexuality and psychoanalysis in film. Because it's a book ultimately about popular culture, this sort of background seems tolend a refreshingly informed perspective to the subject matter, and Storey does an apt job as well of moving between the analytical underpinnings and their particular applications. The first chapter had almost set me completely off the book however, with a rather lumbering attempt at delineating the various definitions of "culture" and "ideology" in a way that seemed to preclude synthesis by assigning the particularly nuances of each major author to completely separate categories. I also found Storey's prose slightly uneven in a way that's difficult to describe. A lot of the author's he mentions write with a dense, steady, even flow that can seize a person into a bit of a flow-state, exhaustively touching upon various authors, attacking a problem from numerous perspectives, and slapping you straight into active reading mode -- filling you all the while with a treasure trove of new ideas. Frederic Jameson is a good example of this. As I read Storey, however, I at times felt my right-brain bits either snoozing off a bit or being rudely riled awake by the abrupt cut-off of an idea or concept that I thought could really have used just a sentence or two more. Could it just have been a subtle difference in the rhythms of American and British English? In any case, that was just my personal qualm. Worth reading as an intro text for the coverage alone!

When I was a grad student in anthropology, I needed to get up to speed in this field in a hurry. I bought the 1st edition of this book and read it quickly. I was very glad for the background in some basic field of cultural theory and popular culture. While no means definitive, and probably debatable on a few points, this is a very effective way to quickly become familiar with the field. I recommend it to undergrads, grad students, and even to neophyte faculty in the field.

John Storey, a senior lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Sutherland in England, gives you a couple of fundamental options in terms of introductory textbooks for a Popular Culture class. Whereas his "Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture: Theories and Methods" is organized by artifacts (television, fiction, films, etc.), "An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture" is organized by competing theories (structuralism, Marxism, Postmodernism, etc.). Consequently, there is considerably more depth in regards to theoretical approaches to the study of Popular Culture, all of which are supported by a wide variety of first-rate examples drawn from the real world. Storey also takes great pains to lay out the various schools for each theoretical approach: e.g, the Classical Marxists, the Frankfurt School, the Althusserians and Neo-Gramscian cultural studies. Both his first chapter on the definitional issues of Popular Culture and his final chapter on "The politics of the popular" provide the contexts in which all of this theoretical material matters. The second edition of this text includes new sections on popular culture and the carnivalesque, and on postmodernism and the pluralism of value. Five of the original sections have been expanded to include material on neo-Gramscian cultural studies, popular film, cine-psychoanalysis and cultural studies, feminism a reading, postermodernism in the 1960s, and the cultural field. Equally important, Storey has updated the examples drawn from popular culture texts. While this is an introductory text, I think it clearly is aimed at a more sophisticated student than Storey's other value. Additionally, the 2nd edition of Storey's "Cultural Theory & Popular Culture: A Reader" is specifically intended as a companion volume for THIS textbook, which was the winner of the Ray and Pat Browne Award of the Popular Culture Association. Whichever way you decide to go in terms of selecting a primary textbook for your Popular Culture class, having the other volumes is of definite value.

I am using "Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture" as the primary textbook in an "Introduction to Popular Culture" class. Now, on the one hand it is clear John Storey's book is not written at an introductory level, which would have been a reason for me not to select it for my class. But this volume has two strengths that overcome that particular liability. The first is that Storey looks at six types of cultural texts: Television, Fiction, Films, Magazines & Newspapers, Popular Music, and Consumption (a.k.a. shopping). That pretty much covers everything you would want to look at in an introduction pop culture class so that students can get excited (relatively speaking) about analyzing their favorite television show or CD. The second strength is that each chapter focuses on two or three key concepts/theories. For example, with television Storey looks at Hall's notions of encoding/decoding television discourse, how television represents the ideology of mass culture, and how there are competing economies of television. So even if the writing level is for the advances student (quality), students being introduced to cultural studies are being presented with only a few concepts to absorb (quantity). Even if he is writing chapters rather than providing essays, each chapter does offer a specific case study (e.g., James Bond novels) that will facilitate student comprehension of the concepts, which they, in turn, should be able to apply in their own papers. Storey does have another volume that is specifically "An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture," but it is structured by theories (culturalism, structuralism, Marxism, etc.). Ideally I would like to be working with a book from Storey that had the structure of the book I am using with the writing style of the other, but clearly you have a choice here as to which way you can go given both your preferences and the level of your course. Storey does a nice job of explicating these concepts without rendering personal judgments, which I think is important when you are trying to get students to actually use such analytical tools. Final note: Storey's "Cultural Theory & Popular Culture: A Reader" is intended as a companion volume for his "Introduction" text and not this one.

provides some history of the Birmingham > school and goes on to summarize the influences of Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, > Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Althusser. It also provides summaries > of Marxism, the Frankfurt School, Feminism, & Postmodernism. --from a friend''s letter.