Spectacle

have read Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, as well as Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. I read the first chapter of each of these pieces. A lot of the ideas and comments about the nature of reality made in Guy Debord’s piece remind me a lot of science fiction author Douglas Adams writings, specifically his two books about Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. There is one line specifically in Debord’s piece about how the spectacle “interrelates and explains a wide…

In the podcast “Human Spectacle 2015”, This American Life takes their listeners into the lives of two individuals who believe or are unaware that all eyes are on them. The host and executive producer, Ira Glass, incorporates clips of either an interview or television, different voices, and mood music into this episode. Through the use of these elements, Ira Glass creates a setting of disbelief and suspense that invokes an exciting element to a non-fictional piece. The prologue of this podcast…

The Chapter I chose to write about is chapter 11, which is on Popular Culture, Media and the Spectacle of Sports. The question that this chapter is trying to make is what kind of impact does the media, advertising, and sports have on our culture? The evidence in the text that supports this question are mass media and television gender roles, the kinds of symbolism males and females have in their roles of media/advertising, and how men and women are perceived differently in the sports world.…

For this week, I decided to the discuss the article Beautiful Ever After “Extreme Makeover” and the Magical, Mythical Spectacle of Rebirth by Fiona Whittington-Walsh. Actually, after reading this article I have conflicting feeling about the word “rebirth”. What is the “rebirth” means in this article: Are you became a new version of yourself? or You are no longer the original version of yourself? (First one is the passive feeling about “rebirth” and the other one is negative feeling.) In the…

A Buried Spectacle Every other year, my family and I travel to Chicago to visit with my uncle and his family. While we have our normal traditions, like eating deep dish pizza, we are always searching for new and interesting places to visit. During our last visit, our parents offered my sisters and me an unusual and unique experience. After spending the day at the Chicago Botanical Gardens, we drove to Ahlgrim Family Funeral Services, which is a funeral home in Palatine, Illinois. Undoubtedly, my…

The notion of male crisis is very prevalent at this juncture in history. It encompasses many of the social, political, and academic debates about men. According to The Personal and the Political by Stephen Whitehead, Susan Faludi’s thesis is that the modern man has been ‘betrayed’ by a combination of factors, notably a sexist consumer culture that commodifies and objectifies the male; the loss of economic authority; the weakening and reshaping of men’s relationship to the world of work; the…

individuals’ racial identity varies over place and time (p. 239). Hall (1997) suggests that stereotypes are used to maintain the boundaries between different groups of people because racial boundaries have proven to be fallible (p. 258). In his text, The Spectacle of the ‘Other’, Hall (1997) offers three different cultural strategies that can be used to combat stereotyping (p. 270). The first strategy is to reverse the stereotype by changing the way in which the stereotype is viewed (Hall,…

Horrors, A Red Record, Mob Rule in New Orleans”, of the elements of hypocrisy that exist in regards to lynching and a major motive: protection of the white woman. Amy Louise Woods writes in Lynching and Spectacle:…

The paper “Postmodern Representation and Commodity Spectacle in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locusts”, written by Mr. Darvay, allowed me to gain insight on a novel I had never read, and to be frank never heard of either. As I was working my way through the paper, my brain was scattered as I tried to grasp the concept that was being talked about. Although, right of the bat the sentence “compressed into one huge junkyard...commercialized society and culture” truly stood out to me. My first…

After reading Mahoney’s Roman Sports and Spectacles, the excerpts from Seneca seemed to be the most relatable when it came to modern sports. Looking at Seneca’s Letter 7, section 1-5, there seems to be more of an idea that the circus or the arena has an affect on the mentality of the spectators. This could easily be related to modern sporting events. Seneca mentions that being at these events can alter the morals of an individual in attendance. On a magnitude of levels this is comparable to…