Full Description
A spirited collection of essays that get to the heart of what gives popular culture its emotional impact
Vaudevillians used the term "the wow climax" to refer to the emotional highpoint of their acts—a final moment of peak spectacle following a gradual building of audience's emotions. Viewed by most critics as vulgar and sensationalistic, the vaudeville aesthetic was celebrated by other writers for its vitality, its liveliness, and its playfulness.
The Wow Climax follows in the path of this more laudatory tradition, drawing out the range of emotions in popular culture and mapping what we might call an aesthetic of immediacy. It pulls together a spirited range of work from Henry Jenkins, one of our most astute media scholars, that spans different media (film, television, literature, comics, games), genres (slapstick, melodrama, horror, exploitation cinema), and emotional reactions (shock, laughter, sentimentality). Whether highlighting the sentimentality at the heart of the Lassie franchise, examining the emotional experiences created by horror filmmakers like Wes Craven and David Cronenberg and avant garde artist Matthew Barney, or discussing the emerging aesthetics of video games, these essays get to the heart of what gives popular culture its emotional impact.
Contents
ContentsIntroduction: Wow! Part I: The Lively Arts1 Games, the New Lively Art 2 Monstrous Beauty and Mutant Aesthetics: Rethinking Matthew Barney's Relation to the Horror Genre Part II: The Immediate Experience3 Death-Defying Heroes 4 Never Trust a Snake: WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama 5 Exploiting Feminism in Stephanie Rothman's Terminal Island 6 "You Don't Say That in English!": The Scandal of Lupe Velez Part III: Welcome to the Playground7 "Going Bonkers!": Children, Play, and Pee-Wee 8 "Complete Freedom of Movement": Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces 9 "Her Suffering Aristocratic Majesty": The Sentimental Value of Lassie Notes Index About the Author
