Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Notes
1. For a discussion of Shakespeare as popular culture in nineteenth-century America, see
Lawrence Levine (1988).
2. Slavoj yizek (1991) identifies the retroactive evaluation which fixed film noir’s current status:
‘It started to exist only when it was discovered by French critics in the ’50s (it is no accident
that even in English, the term used to designate this genre is French: film noir). What was, in
America itself, a series of low-budget B-productions of little critical prestige, was miraculously
transformed, through the intervention of the French gaze, into a sublime object of
art, a kind of film pendant to philosophical existentialism. Directors who had in America the
status of skilled craftsmen, at best, became auteurs, each of them staging in his films a unique
tragic vision of the universe’ (112).
3. For a discussion of opera in popular culture, see Storey, 2002a, 2003 and 2006.
4. See Storey, 2003 and 2005.
5. John Docker (1994) refers to her as ‘an old-style colonialist ethnographer, staring with distaste
at the barbaric ways of strange and unknown people’ (25).
6. It is not just that F.R. Leavis offers us an idealized account of the past, which he does; he actually
idealizes Bourne’s own account, failing to mention his criticisms of rural life.
7. It should be noted, contrary to van den Haag, that Freud is referring to all art, and not just
popular culture.
8. For another excellent example of ‘history from below’, see Chauncey (1994). As Chauncey
explains, ‘As my focus on street-level policing of gender suggests, another of the underlying
arguments of this book is that histories of homosexuality – and sex and sexuality more generally
– have suffered from their overreliance on the discourse of the elite. The most powerful
elements of American society devised the official maps of the culture. . . . While this book
pays those maps their due, it is more interested in reconstructing the maps etched in the city
streets by daily habit, the paths that guided men’s practices even if they were never published
or otherwise formalized. . . . This book seeks to analyze . . . the changing representation of
homosexuality in popular culture and the street-level social practices and dynamics that
shaped the ways homosexually active men were labelled, understood themselves, and interacted
with others’ (26–7).
9. I remember at secondary school a teacher who encouraged us to bring to music lessons our
records by The Beatles, Dylan and The Stones. The class would always end the same way –
he would try to convince us of the fundamental error of our adolescent musical taste.
10. See Storey (1992).
11. See New Left Review (1977).
12. See Stedman Jones (1998).
13. See Storey (1985).
14. ‘We Can Be Together’, from the album Volunteers (1969).
15. See Storey (2009).