Madonna studies
The rhetoric academic view of that time, majority in the sense of postmodernism, generally considered her as "the most significant artist of the late twentieth century" according to The Nation, thus she was understood variously and as a vehicle to open up issues.
[a] At the height of its developments, authors of these academic writings were sometimes called "Madonna scholars" or "Madonnologists", and both E. Ann Kaplan and John Fiske were classified as precursors.
National Geographic Society retrospectively called the field a "controversial" area in 2018; both Madonna studies and its authors received a variety of criticisms from academy and media outlets.
[6] Although numerous academics like David Gauntlett used that term,[7] scholars such as Janice Radway and Suzanna Danuta Walters to journalists like Maureen Orth have referred to them also as the Madonna-ology,[8][9] or Madonnalogy.
[20] In Madonna: A Biography (2007), Mary Cross asserts that "the turmoil of new theory imported from Europe and the culture wars of ideology were bringing huge changes to the American academic world and the college curriculum.
[21] According to professor Santiago Fouz-Hernández, author of Madonna's Drowned Worlds (2004), the abundance of critical work on the artist has almost certainly been part of broader developments in methodological trends in academia: the study of popular culture has come a long way since David Riesman described it in 1960 as "a relatively new field in American social science".
[14] Robert Miklitsch, associate professor of Ohio University dates the start of Madonna studies to 1987 and Rocking Around The Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism & Consumer Culture by E. Ann Kaplan.
[24] At this point, scholars like Kaplan and John Fiske represented Madonna to their academic audiences as a moment in which popular culture imitates critical theories of history, knowledge, and human identity.
[26] Various academics cited the point of view of Steven Anderson from The Village Voice (1989): "Madonna serves as the repository for our ideas about fame, money, sex, feminism, pop culture, even death".
[36] Cathy Schwichtenberg, a University of Georgia professor and editor of The Madonna Connection, asserts that served as a "touchstone for theoretical discussions" on issues of morality, sexuality, gender relations, gay politics, multiculturalism, feminism, race, racism, pornography, and capitalism to name a few.
[37] Authors of Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World, Volume 1 (2011) also added to the spectrum of topics the subcultural appropriation, politics of representation, consumer culture, the male gaze, body modification, reception studies, and postmodernism.
[9] On the report of Eric Weisbard, only Madonna books proliferated in the 1990s (compared to her fellows Michael Jackson and Prince), and the bulk coming from a new group of cultural studies academics, mostly women.
[54] Academics from Thomas Ferraro to Santiago Fouz-Hernández have identified others some core originating texts, like Karlene Faith's Madonna, Bawdy & Soul (1997) and the others previously mentioned by Desmond.
[56] The same year, assistant professor Manav Ratti of Salisbury University, writing for Journal of American Studies wrote an essay about her book Sex and called it an extension of the "scholarship on Madonna".
[33] Charles T. Banner-Haley, a professor of history at Colgate University also confirmed this, saying that "the academic world the force of Madonna has caused a division among scholars that has often gone from the sublime to the silly".
[17] Years prior, in an interview with Vanity Fair according to Gary Goshgarian, she gave a similar answer: "It's flattering to me that people take the time to analyze me and that I've so infiltrated their psyches that they have to intellectualize my very being.
[15] A decade later, in 2003, Stephen Brown from University of Ulster who studied Madonna as a marketing genius, commented that "when you read some of the stuff that academics have written about her, then you're inclined to conclude that certain scholars should get out more".
[69] Although she also worked on the field, Camille Paglia years later, referred to the "pretentious terminology" citing examples of words like "intertextual", "significations", "transgressive", "subversive" or "self-representation".
[18] Similar to Christgau, authors of Media and Cultural Theory (2010) found that the problem with Madonna studies from the perspective of musicology is that "very little analysis is focused on the musical text but rather performances and promotional video".
[24] From an educational sense, some reviewers debated about whether Madonna should have a place in curriculums alongside more established and canonical subjects, while argued that she was an "unworthy of academic study" that "adds nothing to the advancement of knowledge".
[55] In 1997, in a conversation with The Wall Street Journal, Matt Wray asserted at that time the field is "past its prime now", but added "a lot of good work was done on the significance of Madonna".
[44] Loughborough University's Jim McGuigan pointed out that in the cultural studies the case of Madonna was so "overworked" that it has reached tedium, as happened in old schools with the historical problem on the Causes of World War I.
Unpacking the wealth of her artistic strategies, meanings, and effects requires deployment of a full array of textual criticism, audience research, and analysis of the political economy and production of pop culture in our contemporary media society.
[16] Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Bérubé noticed that since the importation of cultural studies to the United States, the field "has basically turned into a branch of pop-culture criticism".
[84] In Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (2011), Paglia referred to the "current academic writing on Madonna" and also on American popular culture in general as "deplorably low quality".
[85] Today, it’s uncontroversial to position the pop star as a coatrack for American mythmaking, racial and gender politics, identity, and occasionally even the history of capitalism [...] We can follow that trend back to Madonna.
[71] In 2001, Andrew Morton informed: "All those college lecturers endlessly debating her impact on racial and gender relations in post-modern society, are still, after twenty years, desperately seeking Madonna".
[26] Andreas Häger from Åbo Akademi University citing Schwichtenberg notes: "Hardly any other popular artist has received as much attention from the scientific community as Madonna".
[13] Commentators like Colombian writer José Yunis, El País's Lola Galán, and Caroline von Lowtzow from Süddeutsche Zeitung made similar observation with Harri's point.
[44] Chilean literary critic Óscar Contardo commented that it broke down Madonna's semiotics: "her image, her music, her media appearances, her staging, and her implicit and explicit messages".
