Full Description
With intense and violent portrayals of death becoming ever more common on television and in cinema and the growth of death-centric movies, series, texts, songs, and video clips attracting a wide and enthusiastic global reception, we might well ask whether death has ceased to be a taboo. What makes thanatic themes so desirable in popular culture? Do representations of the macabre and gore perpetuate or sublimate violent desires? Has contemporary popular culture removed our unease with death? Can social media help us cope with our mortality, or can music and art present death as an aesthetic phenomenon? This volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of the social, cultural, aesthetic, and theoretical aspects of the ways in which popular culture understands, represents, and manages death, bringing together contributions from around the world focused on television, cinema, popular literature, social media and the internet, art, music, and advertising.
Contents
List of Contributors; Preface and acknowledgement; Introduction: Death as a Topic in Contemporary Popular Culture; Part 1: Collective attitudes towards and responses to death and mortality; 1. Thoughts for the Times on the Death Taboo: Trivialisation, Tivolisation and Re-Domestication in the Age of Spectacular Death; 2. A Stark and Lonely Death': Representations of Dying Alone in Popular Culture; 3. Celebrity Deaths and the Thanatological Imagination; 4. The Penguin and the Wahine; Shipwrecks, Resilience and Popular Culture; Part 2: Aesthetical aspects and mythical structures; 5. Healing Comes from Paradise: Illness, Cures and the Staving Off of Death in Naturist Remedies Advertising; 6. The Aesthetics of Corpses in Popular Culture; 7. Into the Dark Side of Pop Art - From Warhol to Banksy; 8. Towards a Cultural Theory of Killing: The Event of Killing in Quentin Tarantino's Movies; Part 3: Death as a significant narrative device; 9. 'The Radio Said: "There's Another Shot Dead"': Popular Culture, 'Rebel' Songs and Death in Irish Memory; 10. Locating Death in Children's Animated Films; 11. Death in Don Delillo's White Noise: A Literary Diagnosis of Contemporary Death Culture; 12. Narratives of Death and Immortality in the 'Islamic State' Discourse on Twitter; Index
