Living the fantasy: The politics of pleasure in mass culture.

In today's complex culture it is no longer possible to think of the mass media as either a form of brainwashing or a genuine expression of popular tastes. In order to account for these contradictory political effects, the media's construction of power via pleasure is of central concern. In readings of Hollywood musical films this study identifies the pleasures of the American mass media as fundamentally utopian, and therefore paradoxical, as well as self-reflexive. Since media texts base their appeal on an assertion of their utopian difference from the real world, they necessarily expose the mechanisms by which they are constructed--not as a detriment to, but actually as a condition of, their popularity. As a result, the media makes itself permanently vulnerable to appropriation by its audiences because it must inculcate in them both an awareness of its artificiality, and a transgressive desire to realize its utopian promises. Post-colonial writing of the Americas heightens and intensifies issues of audience appropriation because of its distance from centers of media production. While the works of U.S. authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Don DeLillo, and Walker Percy exhibit a profound despair in the face of media domination, those of Native Americans N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, Canadians Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Margaret Laurence, and Argentinean Manuel Puig demonstrate skillful and inspired ways to work against media domination through canny participation in its discourses. By writing themselves into the stories told by the mass media their characters learn to re-shape an oppressive reality to their own advantage. The practice of storytelling enables them to challenge Western rationality by investing openly invented discourse with the authority of reality itself.PhDAmerican literatureCanadian literatureCommunication and the ArtsComparative literatureFilm studiesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsLatin American historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129459/2/9513393.pd