Popular Stories and Promised Lands

Book excerpt: Popular culture stories--found in comic strips, TV programs, magazines, and movies--gain their popularity by evoking our desires and anxieties. Aden offers a well-constructed argument that creating a sense of place (and with it a sense of personal identity and community) serves as an important enticement for many popular cultures works. . . . Aden handles contemporary theory deftly and] does an excellent job of identifying many of the tensions present in 20th-century America. --Quarterly Journal of Speech Stories encountered at the movies, on television, and in popular magazines are treated as reflections of the popular culture. . . . Believing that the American experience has been guided by a 'normative narrative' or 'grand narrative' that constitutes the 'American dream, ' Aden holds that stories can be used to extract the 'rules' of a narrative, determine the direction, and identify conceptions of the 'promised lands' for a culture. --Critical Studies in Mass Communication