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"Pulp fiction"
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Who's afraid of Bob Alberts? (On censorship measures against pulp fiction in Slovakia in 1945–1948)
The aim of this study is to examine the censorship measures that led to the banning of pulp fiction in Slovakia after the World War II. To clarify the issue, the introduction documents how the contemporary discourse on pulp fiction was formed and what its basic ideological foundations were. Examples from the period press are used for illustration, including journalistic articles by Alexander Matuška, Andrej Mráz, and Ľudo Zúbek, which contributed significantly to the creation of a negative image of pulp literature and were also direct stimuli for subsequent censorship interventions by the state apparatus. The main part of the article consists of a description of selected measures, including a detailed description of their consequences for publishing and distribution across the board. Using archival documents, the ban on the western novel Zlatá ostroha [The Golden Spur] by Bob Alberts, the pseudonym of Slovak writer Ratibor Bodecký (1922–1968), is examined in particular detail. The final part of the article mentions the chapbook series Ľudové čítanie [Folk reading], which was intended to replace banned literary pulp. Methodologically, the study is based on current views on the issue of control and regulation of literature.
Journal Article
Science Fantasy in the Trente Glorieuses: Maurice Limat’s Chevalier Coqdor Cycle
During the years of the so-called Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975), with its economic recovery after World War II, France witnessed the development of a technologized consumer society and a technocratic approach to public planning, which fostered a futuristic outlook and a boom in paperback publishing. A major success story of this era was the Éditions Fleuve Noir science-fiction series, Anticipation, to which popular genre author Maurice Limat contributed numerous novels. Although marketed as science fiction and set far in the future and in outer space, Limat’s novels featuring the Chevalier Bruno Coqdor resemble more often those of a knight-errant from medieval romance. These works of space fantasy express medieval nostalgia but also engage the massive social changes occurring in France during this period while extrapolating France’s survival in the distant future.
Journal Article
Chemical Composition, In Vitro Digestibility and Rumen Fermentation Kinetics of Agro-Industrial By-Products
The nutritive value of 26 agro-industrial by-products was assessed from their chemical composition, in vitro digestibility and rumen fermentation kinetics. By-products from sugar beet, grape, olive tree, almond, broccoli, lettuce, asparagus, green bean, artichoke, peas, broad beans, tomato, pepper, apple pomace and citrus were evaluated. Chemical composition, in vitro digestibility and fermentation kinetics varied largely across the by-products. Data were subjected to multivariate and principal component analyses (PCA). According to a multivariate cluster analysis chart, samples formed four distinctive groups (A–D). Less degradable by-products were olive tree leaves, pepper skins and grape seeds (group A); whereas the more degradable ones were sugar beet, orange, lemon and clementine pulps (group D). In the PCA plot, component 1 segregated samples of groups A and B from those of groups C and D. Considering the large variability among by-products, most of them can be regarded as potential ingredients in ruminant rations. Depending on the characteristic nutritive value of each by-product, these feedstuffs can provide alternative sources of energy (e.g., citrus pulps), protein (e.g., asparagus rinds), soluble fibre (e.g., sugar beet pulp) or less digestible roughage (e.g., grape seeds or pepper skin).
Journal Article
The Truth Will Set You Free: Erle Stanley Gardner and the Innocence Plot
This essay examines how literature shaped popular ideas about the criminal justice system over the course of the twentieth century by considering Erle Stanley Gardner's bestselling Perry Mason series, published between 1933 and 1973. Despite their formulaic nature, the novels offer valuable insight about the inconsistencies of the courts in three distinct historical eras: public skepticism regarding the legal profession in the 1930s, the championing of the justice system as key to a democratic society in the 1940s and 50s, and the concerns over due process in the 1960s. Across these periods, Gardner's fiction advocated to a mass market readership for faith in justice, despite the series's fundamental premise that an unjust state was a constant threat to innocent civilians.
Journal Article
Rendering swearing across cultures: Arabic professional subtitles and fansubs of Pulp Fiction
Due to the prevalence of swearing in popular Hollywood films, a cross-cultural challenge arises when translating these films into socio-cultural contexts where swearing is more severely proscribed. The present study aims to investigate how swear words are translated into Arabic and whether significant differences exist between professional subtitles and those created by fans in terms of translation strategies. For this study, the film 'Pulp Fiction' (1994), written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, serves as a case study. A quantitative analysis was conducted to determine the frequency of swearing and the translation strategies used in the official DVD subtitles versus the internet fansubs. The goal was to ascertain whether significant differences exist between these two subtitled versions. In addition to the quantitative findings, a qualitative analysis is presented. The results indicate that fansubs tend to retain more swear words than official subtitles and that the choice of translation strategy is influenced by the type of swearing employed.
Journal Article
Popular Culture in a Digital Society: Nine Paradoxes
This entry, which identifies nine paradoxes particular to popular culture in a digital society, begins by distinguishing art and culture, since scholars have historically relied on these terms to differentiate popular culture, mass culture, and mass art. Digital societies, which exist both online and offline, are awash in digital products such as LED signs, digital imagery, video games, film, podcasts, and social media. In a digital society, popular culture is effectively “mass art,” which exhibits five properties: (1) digital media’s low-cost products and low-skill tools are (2) created and distributed to appeal to as broad a cultural sector as possible (qualitative) and thus aim to (3) attract consumers (quantitative) who capably enjoy and deploy cultural content both (4) offline and online, yet “popularity” ultimately depends on (5) efforts to maximize unity and minimize fragmentation. Except for localized events, popular culture has largely disappeared, while mass art will likely flourish until human beings clamor once again for firsthand experiences or go extinct. The next frontier will be finding ways to prevent artificial intelligence from producing cultural products, not because they will be terrible, undesirable, or fake, but because the culture-making process itself engenders human wellbeing.
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Origins of the US Genre-Fiction System, 1890–1956
Though genre fiction is now ubiquitous, and though both book history and literary studies have devoted considerable attention to individual genres like science fiction and romance novels, the history of the system of popular fiction categories has been little studied. This essay traces the origins of the genre-fiction system in United States magazine and book publishing, bringing sociological and book-historical analysis to bear on changing practices of categorization in publishing, advertising, librarianship, and reader response from the 1890s through the 1950s. Genre categories were only intermittently in use through the 1910s; they were first institutionalized in pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. The genre-fiction system was transmitted to book publishing only in the course of the so-called \"paperback revolution\" of the 1940s and 1950s, which made room for fiction-book production by categories while relegating it to a permanently low-status position. This transmission across publishing formats was far from deliberate; instead, the essay argues, the system of genre fiction arose and endured as a stable compromise articulating an expanded fiction-reading public to an expansive print culture industry, making new readers and new fiction---and new kinds of fiction---regularly available to each other in an enduringly hierarchized field.
Journal Article
Fighting the Online War: Online Russian Nationalists and the Discourse of Stalingrad in the Early 2010s
Memory of the Battle of Stalingrad, a pivotal moment in World War II, is a cornerstone of Vladimir Putin’s nationalist mythology. This study examines how participants of the “In the Whirlwind of Time” forum, a Russian-language online community whose usage peaked in the early 2010s, perpetuated and reinterpreted this war myth through science fiction and alternate history narratives at a grassroots level by co-writing literary texts. Writers, driven by nationalist and pro-Soviet sentiments, were informed by Soviet-era literary traditions and modern sociopolitical concerns. Engaging in a collaborative process of memory-making, they merged historical fiction with futuristic elements such as time travel to craft stories where the annihilation and resurrection encoded in the Stalingrad myth solve present-day moral and political crises. By conducting a Critical Discourse Analysis of forum postings and demonstrating how the resultant discourses are present in three key works, the article outlines the norms of the forum’s discourse community to show how these narratives foster a mythic understanding of Stalingrad, transforming it into a timeless and universal battle against purported Western immorality. These stories not only glorify the Soviet past but also serve as ideological tools that both reflect and anticipate Russian state propaganda of the 2020s, suggesting the participatory nature of national identity shaping through mythmaking—and the crucial role that war played in grassroots nationalist narratives in the 2010s.
Journal Article