Critical Studies in Mass Communication

Engnell, Richard A.

doi: 10.1080/15295039509366936pmid: N/A

The spiritual potential of film is grounded in its ability to render “Other” what is presented visually on the screen. However, the narrative structure of a film interacts with the filmed scene to modify its spiritual potential. While scene and narrative can be artfully manipulated to express mystical and theistic sensibilities, film seems inherently biased towards the immanent spirituality of cosmological or plenum religions, but not without some practical difficulties. Schrader's transcendental style can be seen as expressing a quasi‐mystical spirituality. The popular film Places of the Heart intimates a cosmological consciousness, whereas Tender Mercies evokes a spirituality more characteristic of theistic religion.

Lalvani, Suren

doi: 10.1080/15295039509366937pmid: N/A

This article explores the multiple and heterogeneous deployment of the Other within discourses that intersect and contest each other. In the nineteenth century, the discourse of “le femme orientale” which informed the Romantic critique of capitalism, was recuperated in a hegemonic manner to promote a commodity fetish and an expanding consumer culture. The success of this transference was guaranteed by Romanticism, which not only underwrote the discourse of orientalism but ironically advanced a psychology commensurate with the emergence of a consumer society. Since the colonial representation of Otherness operates in a manner analogous to the psychoanalytic fetish, the discursive construction of Otherness is neither fixed nor continuous but ambivalent. The multiple and reciprocal interaction of the twin modes of differentiation—the racial and the sexual—enables the erotic recognition of the Other/the threat of difference to be displaced into alternative fields of power/ knowledge relations and into an economy of desire productive of power.

James, Beverly

doi: 10.1080/15295039509366938pmid: N/A

The economic transformations of East Central Europe opened the floodgates to a sea of western advertising and other symbolic activities aimed at informing the public about new products, their appropriate use, and their social and cultural meanings as markers of status. The significance of advertising and other marketing activities in such a setting lies not in their direct pitches to purchase this or that product, but rather in their subtle instruction in how to experience and express one's cultural identity through spending. Using ethnography and other qualitative approaches, this study explores how people in one particular post‐communist society are making sense of this cultural transition. Specifically, it investigates the ways in which social actors in Hungary—cultural producers as well as the lay public—conceptualize and articulate their experiences as subjects in that nation's transition to a culture of consumption.

Barker‐Plummer, Bernadette

doi: 10.1080/15295039509366939pmid: N/A

This paper discusses news as a political resource for social movements. Specifically, the paper elaborates a conceptualization of news as a discursive resource, and suggests a dialogical model for media‐movement relationships. The paper then uses this framework to investigate the interactions with news media of U.S. women's movement groups. It describes how the two “branches” of the women's movement understood news differently and developed quite different and specific strategies which are called media pragmatism and media subversion. The study raises questions not only about what kind of resource news might be, and to whom it might be available, but also about the forms of knowledge that can be distributed widely in a society saturated with media “logics.”

Sparks, Colin S.

doi: 10.1080/15295039509366940pmid: N/A

This paper reviews recent developments in British television. It argues that, up until recently, the whole of British television—including stations both publicly and privately owned—was a public service system. The impact of the 1990 Broadcasting Act has been to introduce greater competitive pressures into that part of the system financed by advertising. These pressures have been intensified by satellite channels. The direction of the 1994 White Paper on the BBC's future is toward introducing greater commercial pressures into this organization. British television is moving to a commercial system in which there remains a subordinate public service element.