Fredric Wertham And The Critique Of Mass Culture

Author : Bart Beaty
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1604730714
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture written by Bart Beaty and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a re-examination of the critic whose Congressional testimony sparked the Comics Code. Bart Beaty traces the evolution of Wertham's attitudes toward popular culture and reassesses his place in the debate about pop culture's effects on youth and society. When The Seduction of the Innocent was published in 1954, Wertham (1895-1981) became instantly known as an authority on child psychology. Although he had published several books before Seduction, its sharp criticism of popular culture in general--and comic books in particular--made it a touchstone for debate about issues of censorship, child protection, and freedom of speech. This book reinterprets his intellectual legacy and challenges notions about his alleged cultural conservatism. Drawing upon Wertham's published works as well as his unpublished private papers, correspondence, and notes, Beaty reveals a man whose opinions, life, and career offer more subtlety of thought than previously assumed. In particular, the book examines Wertham's change of heart in the 1970s, when he began to claim that comics could be a positive influence in American society.

Author : Paul Lopes
Publisher : Temple University Press
ISBN 13 : 1592134440
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Demanding Respect written by Paul Lopes and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From pulp comics to Maus, the story of the growth of comics in American culture.

Author : Bradford W. Wright
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801874505
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Comic Book Nation written by Bradford W. Wright and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-10-17 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of comic books from the 1930s to 9/11.

Author : Fredric Wertham
Publisher : Main Road Books
ISBN 13 : 9781596830004
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.0X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Seduction of the Innocent written by Fredric Wertham and published by Main Road Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Wertham was senior psychiatrist for the Department of Hospitals in New York City. This book, thoroughly documented by facts and cases, gives the substance of Dr. Wertham's expert opinion on the effects that comic books have on the minds and behavior of children who come in contact with them. Reprint of the 1954 edition with a new comprehensive Introduction by James E. Reibman, Ph.D.

Author : Siân Nicholas
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113673161X
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media written by Siân Nicholas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The media have always played a central role in organising the way ideas flow through societies. But what happens when those ideas are disruptive to normal social relations? Bringing together work by scholars in history, media and cultural studies and sociology, this collection explores this role in more depth and with more attention paid to the complexities behind conventional analyses. Attention is paid to morality and regulation; empire and film; the role of women; authoritarianism; wartime and fears of treachery; and fears of cultural contamination. The book begins with essays that contextualise the theoretical and historiographical issues of the relationship between social fears, moral panics and the media. The second section provides case studies which illustrate the ways in which the media has participated in, or been seen as the source of, the creation of threats to society. Finally, the third section then shows how historical research calls into question simple assumptions about the relationship between the media and social disruption.

Author : Gabriel N. Mendes
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 150170138X
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Under the Strain of Color written by Gabriel N. Mendes and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Under the Strain of Color, Gabriel N. Mendes recaptures the history of Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a New York City institution that embodied new ways of thinking about mental health, race, and the substance of citizenship. The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, the writer Richard Wright, and the clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic emerged in the context of a widespread American concern with the mental health of its citizens. Mendes shows the clinic to have been simultaneously a scientific and political gambit, challenging both a racist mental health care system and supposedly color-blind psychiatrists who failed to consider the consequences of oppression in their assessment and treatment of African American patients. Employing the methods of oral history, archival research, textual analysis, and critical race philosophy, Under the Strain of Color contributes to a growing body of scholarship that highlights the interlocking relationships among biomedicine, institutional racism, structural violence, and community health activism.

Author : Amy Kiste Nyberg
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 9780878059751
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.5X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Seal of Approval written by Amy Kiste Nyberg and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1998 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The content of comic books has been governed by an industry self-regulatory code adopted by publishers in 1954 in response to public and governmental pressure. This book, the first full-length study of this period of comic book history, examines the reasons that comic books were the subject of heated controversy. In tracing the evolution of the controversy and the resulting code, Seal of Approval shows that the comic book has yet to achieve legitimation as a unique form of expression appreciated by readers of all ages.

Author : David Reynolds
Publisher : Problematic Press
ISBN 13 : 0986902705
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Superheroes: An Analysis of Popular Culture's Modern Myths written by David Reynolds and published by Problematic Press. This book was released on 2011-04-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A semiotic and cultural anthropological interrogation of popular North American superhero narratives, such as those of Superman, Spider-Man, and Batman, provides insight into how media’s messages influence the culture’s ethical values. Since emerging in the late 1930s, the superhero has become a pervasive figure in North American popular culture. As an extension of ideas presented by Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Campbell, and Umberto Eco, this dissertation argues that superhero tales must be regarded as modern mythology. It follows that people observe and learn social norms of justice from such narratives, since these ideals are intrinsic to the tales. In investigating the superhero’s role as a contemporary figure of myth, this project focuses primarily on three areas: an account of the history of the superhero from 1938 to present; an examination of the cultural functions of contemporary superhero narratives; and, an interrogation of vigilantism, responsibility, and justice in these narratives and how those concerns further relate to ideologies and practices in North American culture.

Author : Michael Goodrum
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317048393
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Superheroes and American Self Image written by Michael Goodrum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of comic-books, mobilising them as a means to understand better the political context in which they are produced. Structured around key political events in the US between 1938 and 1975, the author combines analyses of visual and textual discourse, including comic-book letters pages, to come to a more complete picture of the relationship between comic-books as documents and the people who read and created them. Exploring the ways in which ideas about the US and its place in the world were represented in major superhero comic-books during the tumultuous period of US history from the Great Depression to the political trauma of Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War, Superheroes and American Self-Image sheds fresh light on the manner in which comic-books shape and are shaped by contemporary politics. As such it will appeal to scholars of cultural and media studies, history and popular culture.

Author : Mariah Adin
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s written by Mariah Adin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What caused four recently bar mitzvahed middle-class youths to go on a crime spree of assault and murder in 1954? This book provides a compelling narrative retelling of the boys, their crimes, and a U.S. culture obsessed with juvenile delinquency. After ongoing months of daily headlines about gang shootouts, stomp-killings, and millions of dollars worth of vandalism, by the summer of 1954, America had had enough of juvenile delinquency. It was in this environment that 18-year-old Jack Koslow and the other three teenage members of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers committed their heinous crimes and achieved notoriety. The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s exposes the underbelly of America's mid-century, the terrible price of assimilation, the uncomfortable bedfellows of comic books and juvenile delinquency, and the dystopia already in bloom amongst American youth well before the 1960s. Readers will be engrossed and horrified by the tale of the Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang whose shocking, front-page story could easily have been copy-pasted from today's online news sites. Author Mariah Adin takes readers along for a breathtaking moment-by-moment retelling of the crime spree, the subsequent interrogations, and the dramatic courtroom showdown, interspersed with expository chapters on juvenile delinquency, America's Jewish community in the post-Holocaust period, and the anti-comics movement. This book serves to merge the history of juvenile delinquency with that of the Great Comic Book Scare, highlights the assimilation of immigrants into America's white mainstream gone wrong, and complicates our understanding of America's "Golden Age."