Philip Corrigan

Illuminating one of the most pervasive issues of our time, Popular Culture is the first book to link the importance and implications of popular culture with pedagogical practice. It shows how cultural forms such as Hollywood films, pop music, soap operas, and televangelism are organized by gender, age, class, race, and ethnicity, thus providing the contradictory text that both enables and disables emancipatory interest, so fundamental to the formation of self and society. What emerges is a redefinition of the very notion of popular culture.

This is an exhilarating book, written by one of sociology’s most imaginative theorists and critics. Professor Corrigan proceeds by turning old answers into new questions. He draws on a rich tradition of thought from sociology, philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and literary criticism to explore major ongoing problems in everyday life: moral regulation, schooling, the capitalist world economy, intellectuals, and the problem of difference, masculinity. The result is one of the most dazzling contributions to critical sociology published in recent years.

This is an exhilarating book, written by one of sociology’s most imaginative theorists and critics. Professor Corrigan proceeds by turning old answers into new questions. He draws on a rich tradition of thought from sociology, philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and literary criticism to explore major ongoing problems in everyday life: moral regulation, schooling, the capitalist world economy, intellectuals, and the problem of difference, masculinity. The result is one of the most dazzling contributions to critical sociology published in recent years.