From the Editor’s Desk
This issue starts with a bang. In “The Birth of Theory,” Daniel Ferreras
contextualizes the abuses of post-modern theoretical discourse in a clear, logical
fashion and denounces the constant erasure of meaning implied by its various
manipulative strategies. After the damage caused by postmodern criticism upon
literary studies, this insightful and highly documented essay aims to warn
against the Empire of Theory, as postmodern discourse attempts to take over
Popular Culture Studies. As Ferreras makes clear in his first salvo, our field does
not have to accept the supremacy of over-conceptualized, ultimately self-serving
inquiries.
Dennis Rohatyn follows with his lyrical meditation “Einstein on the Strip:
A Meditation on Fame, Fate, and Laws of (Meta) Physics.” Einstein, he tells us,
is “Everywhere and everywhen. He has metamorphosed: he’s a phantasmagoria,
a kaleidoscope with soundtrack” and goes on to prove it with a breadth of
references and clarity that are as captivating as they are intellectually satisfying,
reverberating in our minds long after reading.
Further illustrating the breadth of Popular Culture Studies, for sports fans
and others, we move to “The Simplification of NFL Team Logos: Television
and Graphic Design in the 1950s and 1960s” in which Lawrence Mullen,
Anthony Ferri, and Gregory Borchard explain how sports symbols act as
symbolic byproducts of society, even following the fan to the grave and beyond.
They examine how these symbols were affected by both the changing technical
requirements of television and developments in the field of graphic design.
Joseph Ceccio and Erin Kelley separately brave the dark new world of
vampires that seems to be permeating popular culture. Ceccio discusses Briggs’s
dark urban fantasy series centered around Mercy Thompson, a series that offers,
he says, “a fascinating twist on 21st century werewolf, vampire, and fae lore,”
resulting in “a United Nations of preternatural creatures, happily at ease in the
electronic age.” Erin Kelley examines obsession in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight
series. While the romance of Edward and Bella is, as she says, “a romance that
transcends both human and supernatural worlds as well as a love that abounds
eternity,” she questions, among other things, the sanity of a heroine who finds it
necessary to put herself in peril for love and conjectures what would have
happened had Edward met up with a strong, independent girl.
Speaking of popular lovers, star-crossed and otherwise, James Forse gives
us a reading of Romeo and Juliet as a flawed comedy instead of a flawed
tragedy, stressing the popular culture aspects.
Not to be missed are this issue’s book reviews, including Michael Green’s
take on Nicole Huber and Ralph Stem’s Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las
Vegas. Stem was the keynote speaker at the Far West Conference several years
ago.