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Keywords

Myth These ten points provide a general “definitional matrix” for my study of myth in journalism and popular culture.

Apocalypse The apocalypse myth has a long lineage in a variety of historic cultures not just the Judeo-Christian world. As Eugen Weber has argued, “apocalypse long furnished the key to human history,” particularly in the Judeo-Christian west where until the 17th century “premonitory history” was history.

The quest The quest myth is one of the fundamental mythic patterns discernable in a variety of cultures and times: the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail, Moses’ quest for the promised land, the exploits of the Homeric Odyssey are obvious examples. The Star Wars films, The Lord of the Rings or The Matrix trilogy offer variations of this story in contemporary guise.

New world/other world The quest narrative is closely related to the discovery of new worlds, expanding the frontier is a task faced with both desire and trepidation in many traditional hero stories.

Home Creation myths and national foundation myths are common mythic forms. The myth of the Jewish promised land is one such ancient story that continues to have very material consequences.

The family drama The web of family drama is today unavoidably set against pervasive psychoanalytic self-awareness. Classic myths meet dysfunctional families and royal successions are played out in the corporate corridors of multinational organisations.

The alchemist In popular discourse alchemy is only tangentially related to the complexities of the mystic precursor of modern chemistry. In its ancient form, alchemy was not just based around crude attempts to transform lead into gold but was a well developed esoteric philosophical system.

The Trickster The trickster is one of the most enduring and widespread mythical figures. The antics of Br’er Rabbit, the Shakespearean fool, Native American Coyote tales, Chinese Monkey tales, the adventures of the Greek god Hermes, and the exploits of the Rabelaisian carnival can all be read as realms of the trickster type.

 

 

PhD Thesis (Current)

Apocalypse now: popular eschatologies in news media, literature, film and television in a post September 11 world

“I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.”

– Clov in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.

Study overview

The study will explore the relationships between the interlocking fields of news media, literature, film and television drama. While each of these cultural fields are defined by their particular forms and inherent possibilities, their boundaries are permeable and each functions as part of the network of sense making structures available to postmodern “nomadic subjects” (Braidotti 1994; Brown 1996).

Specifically the study will focus on an analysis of eschatological narratives of apocalypse in a series of case studies from each of these genres.

Although it will not focus exclusively, or primarily, on texts that explicitly evoke the events of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre, this event and the subsequent “war on terrorism” provide a compelling contemporary political and cultural context for an examination of apocalyptic narratives.

Research objectives

  • To develop a model of journalism as popular culture, which reads it intertextually with other forms of cultural production.
  • To further develop an effective model of myth as a heuristic device for journalism and cultural studies, building on my previous work (O’Donnell 2003, 2004a; 2004b).
  • To delineate a contemporary typology of the apocalypse myth.
  • To develop a set of case-study readings, consistent with the theoretical model outlined, of the apocalyptic in contemporary journalism, film, television and literature.

Journalism, cinema and popular culture

Most of the research that has been carried out on journalism and popular culture to date has focused on ‘tabloidisation’ (Sparks & Dahlgren 1992; Langer 1998; Lumby 1999; Sparks and Tulloch 2000) and its various critiques. Even the more sophisticated of these studies tend to focus on the problematics of the popular and attendant influences on changing practices within journalism. Such arguments tend to be framed by traditional democratic theory about civic culture and the public sphere (Sparks 2000: 28-29).

Hartley (1996) has attempted to develop a model of journalism seen as part of a “mediasphere” that includes a variety of popular media products ranging from the serious to the tabloid. While his notion of journalism as the “sense making practice of modernity” is a useful one, most of his analysis is limited to an intertextual analysis of journalistic forms rather than an analysis of linkages between journalism and other popular cultural forms such as film and television drama.

In an introduction to a collection of essays on tabloid journalism Zelizer (2000:x-xi) proposes that the link between journalism and other cultural forms is actually central to the debate about journalism and it’s public:

Tabloids fill a need for moralistic tales and gossip, for stories of human gore and human interest, for sensational and intrigue ridden narratives about both everyday life and the unreachable world of celebrities. Those needs emerge as relevant in every other arena of cultural production: fiction cinema, poetry art. Why then are we so outraged when they surface in journalism?….tabloids offer mainstream news both a way to examine itself and to come to grips with the impulses motivating the world at large. They offer journalism a bridge back to the public and the public sensibility which it is supposed to serve.

Numerous works within cinema studies have attempted to look at narratives of race, (Shapiro 1999; Denizen 2002) gender (Tasker 1998; Wood 1998) and sexuality (Lang 2002). While such studies obviously engage with the evolving social narrative around these issues, as well as their specific encoding in film, few studies have explicitly explored the interrelationships between journalistic representations of such social narratives and cinematic representations.

Barbara Creed’s (2003) recent analysis of the TV news coverage of September 11 from the perspective of cinema studies is one move toward an intertextual analysis of film and news media. Another study, which makes suggestive links between public and cinematic representations, is Rogin’s (1987) fascinating “Ronald Reagan, the movie”. Rogin argues that there is an uncanny slippage between the image created by the actor during Reagan’s 1940s film career and the image he cultivated and actions he took as president in the 1980s.

Joseph Natoli (1994) in an eclectic study of early nineties American culture interweaves analysis of news events and film in a series of reflective essays. He writes:

I crisscross between the lived experiences (I scour headlines, listen to the talk shows, follow the campaign) of our present culture and popular film in the hope of bring to a consumable and respondable level some of what haunts us. The greater the box office success of a film the greater the chance today that this film is trading in haunting material….I see narratives of art, including popular film, not ordering but putting into play the accidentals and contingencies – the disorder – of lived experience. (1994:4)

Similarly, in a cultural history of the American sixties subtitled: “movies, media and the mythology of the sixties,” Hoberman (2003) argues that electoral politics, mass media, and popular culture combined in a “new totality – an additional atmosphere, a second nature, the dream life of the nation.” (2003:xiv)

American movies, abetted by the TV shows, news weeklies, Top 40 songs, bestsellers, polls, advertising campaigns, and other scenarios that define the modern polity, produced a social mythology, or realm of shared material fantasy….American democracy was appreciated as a form of theatre in which political leaders assumed the symbolic weight of movie stars, headline celebrities and other media phantasms. (2003:xiv)

My study aims to build on this body of work in order to explicate a contemporary social mythology that delineates some of the “haunting material” that can be found at the intersection of cinema and politics, news and film, the fantastic and the everyday. Notions of narrative and myth will be used to analyse this intertextual cultural storytelling.

For more detail and references download full proposal

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