Books are important sources of historical scholarship. To find books at the Gordon Library:
Ebooks: Many of Gordon Library's books are available digitally, and you can access these via the links in WPI Library Search. For example:
Print books: Print books in the library are organized by call number. When you find a print book in the WPI Library Search, look for the book's call number:
Call numbers A-N are on the ground floor of the library. Call numbers P-Z are on the 1st floor. (Please note that the main entrance to the library is on the 2nd floor.)
You can check books out at the information services desk on the main floor. Your WPI ID is your library card.
The books listed here are just some examples of the books you can find via Gordon Library and represent just a few of the topics you may want to research for this class. You can use WPI Library Search to find many books on a variety of topics.
Asian Popular Culture in Transition
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Asian Popular Culture in Transition examines contemporary consumption practices in South Korea, China, India, and Japan, and both updates and extends popular culture studies of the region. Through an interdisciplinary lens, this collection of essays explores how recent advances and shifts in information technologies and globalization have impacted cultural markets, fashion, the digital generation, mobile culture, femininity, matrimonial advertising, and a film actress' image and performance. Drawing upon a diverse range of sources and methods including historical research, content analysis, anthropological observation, textual analyses, and interviews, Asian Popular Culture in Transition makes a significant contribution to this growing area of research. Given its broad range of countries, theories, and approaches, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, cultural studies, media and communication studies, and gender studies.
China in the Mix
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Scarce attention has been paid to the dimension of sound and its essential role in constructing image, culture, and identity in Chinese film and media. China in the Mix fills a critical void with the first book on the sound, languages, scenery, media, and culture in post-Socialist China. In this study, Ying Xiao explores fascinating topics, including appropriations of popular folklore in the Chinese new wave of the 1980s; Chinese rock 'n' roll and youth cinema in fin de siècle China; the political-economic impact of free market imperatives and Hollywood pictures on Chinese film industry and filmmaking in the late twentieth century; the reception and adaptation of hip hop; and the emerging role of Internet popular culture and social media in the early twenty-first century. Xiao examines the articulations and representations of mass culture and everyday life, concentrating on their aural/oral manifestations in contemporary Chinese cinema and in a wide spectrum of media and cultural productions. China in the Mix offers the first comprehensive investigation of Chinese film, expressions, and culture from a unique, cohesive acoustic angle and through the prism of global media-cultural exchange. It shows how the complex, evolving uses of sound (popular music, voice-over, silence, noise, and audio mixing) in film and media reflect and engage the important cultural and socio-historical shifts in contemporary China and in the increasingly networked world. Xiao offers an innovative new conception of Chinese film and media and their audiovisual registers in the historiographical frame of China amid the global landscape.
Chinese Fans of Japanese and Korean Pop Culture
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How can Japanese popular culture gain numerous fans in China, despite pervasive anti-Japanese sentiment? How is it that there's such a strong anti-Korean sentiment in Chinese online fan communities when the official Sino-Korean relationship is quite stable before 2016? Avid fans in China are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding to make gifts to their idols in foreign countries. Tabloid reports on Japanese and Korean celebrities have been known to trigger nationalist protests in China. So, what is the relationship between Chinese fandom of Japanese and Korean popular culture and nationalist sentiment among Chinese youth? Chen discusses how Chinese fans of Japanese and Korean popular culture have formed their own nationalistic discourse since the 1990s. She argues that, as nationalism is constructed from various entangled ideologies, narratives, myths and collective memories, popular culture simply becomes another resource for the construction of nationalism. Fans thus actively select, interpret and reproduce the content of cultural products to suit their own ends. Unlike existing works, which focus on the content of transnational cultural flows in East Asia, this book focuses on the reception and interpretation of the Chinese audience.
Gender in Japanese Popular Culture
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This open-access essay collection brings together a range of viewpoints on gender from a diverse group of international scholars based in Finland, Belgium, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. The focus is, in particular, on gender performativity and non-binary or non-normative gender. The essays examine the ways in which gender can be depicted, perceived, and understood in Japanese popular culture. The work will be of interest to scholars working in gender studies, Asian studies, and popular culture. It will also act as a source text for higher education courses in Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Hegemonic Mimicry
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Kyung Hyun Kim considers the recent global success of Korean popular culture--the Korean wave of pop music, cinema, and television also known as hallyu--from a transnational and transcultural perspective.
Understanding Popular Culture
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This revised edition of a now classic text includes a new introduction by Henry Jenkins, explaining 'Why Fiske Still Matters' for today's students, followed by a discussion between former Fiske students Kevin Glynn, Jonathan Gray, and Pamela Wilson on the theme of 'Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular'. Both underline the continuing relevance of this foundational text in the study of popular culture. What is popular culture? How does it differ from mass culture? And what do popular "texts" reveal about class, race, and gender dynamics in a society? John Fiske answers these and a host of other questions in Understanding Popular Culture. When it was first written, Understanding Popular Culture took a groundbreaking approach to studying such cultural artifacts as jeans, shopping malls, tabloid newspapers, and TV game shows, which remains relevant today. Fiske differentiates between mass culture - the cultural "products" put out by an industrialized, capitalist society - and popular culture - the ways in which people use, abuse, and subvert these products to create their own meanings and messages. Rather than focusing on mass culture's attempts to dominate and homogenize, he prefers to look at (and revel in) popular culture's evasions and manipulations of these attempts. Designed as a companion to Reading the Popular, Understanding Popular Culture presents a radically different theory of what it means for culture to be popular: that it is, literally, of the people. It is not imposed on them, it is created by them, and its pleasures and meanings reflect popular tastes and concerns - and a rejection of those fostered by mass culture. With wit, clarity, and insight, Professor Fiske debunks the myth of the mindless mass audience, and demonstrates that, in myriad ways, popular culture thrives because that audience is more aware than anyone guesses.
Is there something you need that the WPI library doesn't have? Our Interlibrary Loan service allows WPI students and faculty to request items from other libraries free of charge.
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Catalog of books (and other materials) in libraries worldwide.