Page 207 - Cultural Studies Dictionary
P. 207

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES



                   been sucked into a ‘black hole’. In particular, for Baudrillard, television is the heart
                   of a culture marked by an all-encompassing flow of fascinating simulations and
                   facsimiles. That is, a hyperreality in which we are overloaded with images and
         184       information. The prefix ‘hyper’ signifies ‘more real than real’ – a real retouched in
                   a ‘hallucinatory resemblance’ with itself. Baudrillard describes a process leading to
                   the collapse of boundaries, which he calls ‘implosion’, between the media and the
                   social. Here the news – ‘reality’ – and entertainment – ’fiction’ – blur into each other
                   so that ‘TV is the world’. Thus, television simulates real-life situations not so much
                   to represent the world as to execute its own as simulacrum.
                      The idea of a simulacrum has also been applied to Disneyland and Disney World,
                   two of the most significant multimedia symbolic public spaces of the twenty-first
                   century. Thus Disney presents a simulacrum of ‘Main Street USA’, where the
                   American urban landscape takes on symbolic and imaginary form. In this copy of
                   city life USA there are no guns, no homeless people, no drugs and no fear, which
                   is thus a far cry from the streets of New York City. Disney World’s
                   stimulating/simulated visual culture is the new model for public space whose
                   principles are echoed in numerous shopping malls.
                   Links City, hyperreality, postmodernism, postmodernity, realism, signs, symbolic

                Soap opera A popular form of serial television that has received considerable attention
                   from cultural studies writers, especially since the mid-1980s, both in terms of its
                   textual construction and its audience responses. As a text, soap opera has been the
                   butt of high cultural aesthetic disdain and a number of cultural writers have been
                   concerned to demonstrate that this has been the outcome of distinctions of taste
                   formed by cultural power rather than a matter of any lack of intrinsic worth or
                   complexity as a text. Thus it has been argued that soap opera is a complex popular
                   form marked by:


                   • Open-ended narratives without the sense of closure to be found in the feature
                      film or the 13-episode series.
                   • Core locations that establish a sense of geographical space that the audience can
                      identify with and to which the characters return again and again.
                   • The tension between the conventions of realism and melodrama so that soap
                      operas can be differentiated from one another in terms of the balance struck
                      between these conventions.
                   • The pivotal themes of inter-personal relationship wherein marriages, divorces,
                      break-ups, new alliances, arguments, acts of revenge and acts of caring are at the
                      core of the soap opera narrative and provide the dynamic and emotional
                      interest.

                      The manner in which women have been addressed and represented in soap
                   opera has been pursued by a number of feminist writers because it is frequently
                   suggested that soap opera is a women’s space in which women’s motivations are
                   validated and celebrated. Broadly speaking, writers have concluded that soap opera
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