CounterTexts: Reading Culture identifies and analyzes the ideological coding of media representations as cultural signs that we learn through, about, and from. It engages how we participate in and actualize the performative ground of the culture industry. CounterTexts: Reading Culture will present various readings of cultural signs, objects and practices as means of countering the media focus on narrowing the subjective desire of citizens and consumers in an economy of intellectual and material self-fulfillment based on an empire of representations whose terms and values are to be worked out and actualized commercially at any and all costs. CounterTexts: Reading Culture will engage the following questions: what does a sign of culture teach and how? What are the sources and openings of its meanings and power? its pedagogy? How does it inform the subjectivity of culture and the living text of social practices? How can we engage the signs of culture? CounterTexts: Reading Culture aims to awake a critical consiousness; to enable a critical vocabulary and means for analyzing how we cultivate passion in relation to cultural signs, texts, and representations for the sake of finding satisfaction and pleasure in everyday life. But it will do so by looking at how meaning and desire is created in us and works through through the signs of culture we are exposed to through the texts and media.

CounterTexts: Reading Culture

Literature & Fiction

Trifonas, Peter Pericles

History & Criticism

PostTexte

What do professional wrestling, Pot Noodle and Feng Shui have in common? Well, not much - but they all appear in this book. Critic and cultural philosopher Peter Trifonas and art historian Effie Balomenos explore the curious concept of good - and bad - taste. At once an absurd and yet entirely everyday concept, taste defines us. Our choices, from the most personal (our friends or lovers) to the most general (our politics), are all partly dependent on it. But where does taste come from? Is there a true standard of taste? Are we slaves to the cruel whims of fashion? Who's in control? Good Taste is an enthralling exploration of the cultural history of an idea. In this enticing book - divided into chapters exploring cultural artefacts of absolutely all kinds - Trifonas and Balomenos warn: you are what you choose! Highlights include: TV chefs * Ozzy Osbourne and Reality TV * The 70s fashion conspiracy * Disney * Madonna * Lamborghini * The history of cleavage * High heels * Elvis * Body piercing * Hip-hop * Oprah Winfrey * Ageing rock bands * Turn-ups * Harry Potter * Fake tans and much, much more ...

Good Taste: How What You Choose Defines Who You Are

Trifonas, Peter

Balomenos, Effie

Self-Help

From the Prologue My mother Martha Karanicolas emigrated to Canada in 1954 from Sellasia after the Greek civil war to join her sister, Aphroditi, and her brother, Lefteri, in Toronto. It was a chance to make a new life. In 1958, she paid the way for Panagiotis Trifonas to come from the village and be her husband. A year later in, 1959 they married. I had been going to Sellasia since I was a young boy of 4 years. The little I knew of the village was told to me by my grandmothers, Ekaterini and Georgitsa, and grandfathers, Pericles and Yiorgos, during the summers I spent there, quite oblivious to the history of a place tracing back before the Battle of Sellasia in 222 BC. During one of these trips in 1972, I discovered a diary among a stash of books that had belonged to my father. The pages were yellowed by the passing of time, and it was held together by a red elastic ready to snap. I did not know the language well enough to read the diary. It disappeared until 2012 when I found it again in Canada after my father died. As I read, the history of Sellasia during Nazi occupation of the village in 1943-1944 came alive through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy. The diary was an ancestral genealogy of both sides of my family, Trifonas and Karanicolas, told through a war-time story of human perseverance, unimaginable courage, and endless hope. To understand the lived experience of one's father, mother, aunt, or uncle as a child is unimaginable. And yet, the diary was a time capsule that allowed me to follow the physical and psychological journey into a life that had begun before I was born and was also a part of who I was, would be and am now. For a long time, I did not know what to do with the manuscript, so it sat in the drawer of an old dresser until I felt the need to revisit the story my father told, for some reason or other. Usually inspired by the almost daily conversations I had with my mother about events in Sellasia during the war that came up while she watched documentaries on Greek television about the Nazi occupation of her homeland. She was the first to suggest that I publish the diary to reveal the truth about the hardships the village faced at the hands of the Germans. But also, to tell the story of the people of Sellasia who overcame the horrors of war with bravery and to live on with dignity and love. The events in the original manuscript of the diary remain largely unchanged and true in my version, despite frequent clumsy writing and some poetic license. Peter Pericles Trifonas December 24, 2021

Sellasia

Genre Fiction

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