Cultural Theory And Popular Culture: An Introduction

New to this edition: Extensively revised, rewritten, and updated; Improved and expanded content throughout including a new chapter on psychoanalysis and a new section on post-Marxism and the global postmodern; Closer explicit links to the new edition companion reader Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader; More illustrative diagrams and images; Fully revised, improved, and updated companion web site.

Ideal for courses in: cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, sociology of culture, popular culture, visual studies, cultural criticism.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

Good Coverage, , 2005-11-08
Very interesting read and served as a great contextualizer. Its coverage is broad, touching upon everything from the British traditions, Structuralism, Marxism, Post-modernism, to discourses on Power, Gender and Sexuality and psychoanalysis in film. Because it's a book ultimately about popular culture, this sort of background seems tolend a refreshingly informed perspective to the subject matter, and Storey does an apt job as well of moving between the analytical underpinnings and their particular applications.

The first chapter had almost set me completely off the book however, with a rather lumbering attempt at delineating the various definitions of "culture" and "ideology" in a way that seemed to preclude synthesis by assigning the particularly nuances of each major author to completely separate categories.

I also found Storey's prose slightly uneven in a way that's difficult to describe. A lot of the author's he mentions write with a dense, steady, even flow that can seize a person into a bit of a flow-state, exhaustively touching upon various authors, attacking a problem from numerous perspectives, and slapping you straight into active reading mode -- filling you all the while with a treasure trove of new ideas. Frederic Jameson is a good example of this. As I read Storey, however, I at times felt my right-brain bits either snoozing off a bit or being rudely riled awake by the abrupt cut-off of an idea or concept that I thought could really have used just a sentence or two more. Could it just have been a subtle difference in the rhythms of American and British English?

In any case, that was just my personal qualm. Worth reading as an intro text for the coverage alone!


8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

Excellent and clear introduction--a good foundation, 2004-09-27
When I was a grad student in anthropology, I needed to get up to speed in this field in a hurry. I bought the 1st edition of this book and read it quickly. I was very glad for the background in some basic field of cultural theory and popular culture.

While no means definitive, and probably debatable on a few points, this is a very effective way to quickly become familiar with the field. I recommend it to undergrads, grad students, and even to neophyte faculty in the field.

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