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The American Literatures Initiative
The Clay Sanskrit Library
NYU Press
838 Broadway, 3rd Floor
New York, New York 10003
1-800-996-6987
Tel: 212-998-2575
Fax: 212-995-3833

Paperback: $23.00
ISBN: 9780814742839
Release Date: 12/24/2006
304 pages
Also available in Cloth



The Wow Climax
Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture
Henry Jenkins

View the Table of Contents.   Read the Introduction.

Henry Jenkins at Authors@Google (video)

"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 scholars engagement with the emotional punch of media.—PsycCRITIQUES

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.




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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The founder and director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program, Henry Jenkins has written or edited over ten books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including, for NYU Press, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, and The Children's Culture Reader.





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