新世纪英语专业综合教程(第二版)第4册Unit14

Unit Unit 14 14UNDER UNDER THE THE SIGN SIGN OF OF MICKEY MICKEY MOUSE MOUSE & & CO. CO.

Audiovisual supplement

Cultural information

American popular culture is the attitudes and perspectives shared by the majority of the U.S. citizens, which expresses itself through a number of media, including movies, music, sports and cultural icons.

Audiovisual supplement

Cultural information

Movies e.g. Hollywood, Broadway Music e.g. hip-hop, Rap, jazz, blues, country, R&B Sports e.g. NBA Cultural icons e.g. Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny

Audiovisual supplement

Cultural information

American Brands: Coca-Cola,IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Wal-Mart Stores, etc. American movies’ ticket office in China: American movies Avatar and Alice in Wonderland ranked the first and the second in China’s ticket office list of 2010.

Structural analysis

Rhetorical features

American culture has been infiltrating nations all over the world over the past two decades, marginalizing traditional cultures throughout the world and bringing about the kind of global “fun” culture that Disney is famous for. In this text, Todd Gitlin reveals the trend that American culture is becoming dominant and enjoys worldwide popularity, and accounts for this cultural phenomenon.The text can be divided into the following three parts: Part I (Paragraph 1): This is the introduction where the author advances his idea that American culture is dominant over the “global village”.

Structural analysis

Rhetorical features

Part II (Paragraphs 2 — 5): This part presents evidence of the universal popularity that American culture enjoys, and explores what underlies the cultural phenomenon. This part can be further divided into two sub-sections. Paragraphs 2 — 4 as a sub-section give testimony to the idea that American pop culture is recognized worldwide, while Paragraph 5 explains why it is so.

Part III (Paragraph 6): The author concludes his argument with a thought-provoking restatement of his point.

Detailed reading

UNDER THE SIGN OF MICKEY MOUSE & CO. Todd Gitlin 1 Everywhere, the media flow defies national boundaries. This is one of its obvious, but at the same time amazing, features. A global torrent is not, of course, the master metaphor to which we have grown accustomed. We re more accustomed to Marshall McLuhan s global village. Those who resort to this metaphor casually often forget that if the world is a global village, some live in mansions on the hill, others in huts. Some dispatch images and sounds around town at the touch of a button; others collect them at the touch of their buttons. Yet McLuhan s image reveals an indispensable half-truth. If there is a village, it speaks American. It wears jeans, drinks Coke, eats at the golden arches, walks on swooshed shoes, plays electric guitars, recognizes Mickey Mouse, James Dean, E.T., Bart Simpson, R2-D2, and Pamela Anderson.

Detailed reading

2 At the entrance to the champagne cellar

of PiperHeidsieck in Reims, in eastern France, a plaque declares that the cellar was dedicated by Marie Antoinette. The tour is narrated in six languages, and at the end you walk back upstairs into a museum featuring photographs of famous people drinking champagne. And who are they? Perhaps members of today s royal houses, presidents or prime ministers, economic titans or Nobel Prize winners? Of course not. They are movie stars, almost all of them American - Marilyn Monroe to Clint Eastwood. The symmetry of the exhibition is obvious, the premise unmistakable: Hollywood stars, champions of consumption, are the royalty of this century, more popular by far than poor doomed Marie.

Detailed reading

3 Hollywood is the global cultural capital - capital in both senses. The United States presides over a sort of World Bank of styles and symbols, an International Cultural Fund of images, sounds, and celebrities. The goods may be distributed by American-, Canadian-, European-, Japanese-, or Australian-owned multinational corporations, but their styles, themes, and images do not detectably change when a new board of directors takes over. Entertainment is one of America s top exports. In 1999, in fact, film, television, music, radio, advertising, print publishing, and computer software together were the top export, almost $80 billion worth, and while software alone accounted for $50 billion of the total, some of that category also qualifies as entertainment - video games and pornography, for example.

Detailed reading

Hardly anyone is exempt from the force of American images and sounds. French resentment of Mickey Mouse, Bruce Willis, and the reset of American civilization is well known. Less well known, and rarely acknowledged by the French, is the fact that Terminator 2 sold 5 million tickets in France during the month it opened - with no submachine guns at the heads of the customers. The same culture minister, Jack Lang, who in 1982 achieved a moment of predictable notoriety in the United States for declaring that Dallas amounted to cultural imperialism, also conferred France s highest honor in the arts on Elizabeth Taylor and Sylvester Stallone. The point is not hypocrisy pure and simple but something deeper, something obscured by a single-minded emphasis on American power: dependency.

Detailed reading

American popular culture is the nemesis that hundreds of millions - perhaps billions - of people love, and love to hate. The antagonism and the dependency are inseparable, for the media flood - essentially American in its origin, but virtually unlimited in its reach - represents, like it or not, a common imagination.

Detailed reading

4 How shall we understand the Hong Kong T-shirt that says “I Feel Coke”? Or the little Japanese girl who asks an American visitor in all innocence, “Is there really a Disneyland in Amer …… 此处隐藏：6482字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……