The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture

by Henry Jenkins

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814743119
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	12/24/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	285
Sales rank:	347,793
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He is the author or coauthor of twenty books including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism.

Table of 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 

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Building on the tradition of social commentators such as Gilbert Seldes, Robert Warshow, and Susan Sontag, Henry Jenkins brings his outstanding insight and compassionate counsel to contemporary cultural phenomena. Here not only media, but affect, matters. A delightful and helpful collection on popular pleasures.”
-Janet Staiger,author of Media Reception Studies

“Offers a lively, diligently researched, and well-written account of one scholar's engagement with the emotional punch of media.”
-PsycCRITIQUES

Editorial Reviews

"Offers a lively, diligently researched, and well-written account of one scholar’s engagement with the emotional punch of media."

PsycCRITIQUES

"Building on the tradition of social commentators such as Gilbert Seldes, Robert Warshow, and Susan Sontag, Henry Jenkins brings his outstanding insight and compassionate counsel to contemporary cultural phenomena. Here not only media, but affect, matters. A delightful and helpful collection on popular pleasures."

Janet Staiger

Building on the tradition of social commentators such as Gilbert Seldes, Robert Warshow, and Susan Sontag, Henry Jenkins brings his outstanding insight and compassionate counsel to contemporary cultural phenomena. Here not only media, but affect, matters. A delightful and helpful collection on popular pleasures.”
-Janet Staiger,author of Media Reception Studies

“Offers a lively, diligently researched, and well-written account of one scholar’s engagement with the emotional punch of media.”
• PsycCRITIQUES

From the Publisher