A new Henry Jenkins' book — “The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture” — came out this past December, and we never like to pass up an opportunity to promote one of our favorite academics — and one of the most original and nuanced cultural critics. And that's even true when his book is simply a collection of previous essays.

As Mikita Brottman of PopMatters notes, while some of the essays are less insightful than others, the mix between the popular, political and the personal (who knew Jenkins was a fan of superheroes, Lassie and Pee Wee — all subjects of distinct essays?) creates a fresh critical approach.

Instead of seeing the emotional response to pop culture as a symptom of pop culture's appeal to the lowest common denominator, Jenkins justifies the joy and wonder that pop culture often elicits by revealing what the "wow" means (pdf):

Most popular culture is shaped by a logic of emotional intensification. It is less interested in making us think than it is in making us feel. Yet that distinction is too simple: popular culture, at its best, makes us think by making us feel …. Popular culture can generate a fair amount of effortless emotion by following well-trod formulas, but to make us go "wow" it has to twist or transform those formulas into something marvelous and unexpected …. To fully appreciate a piece of popular art, you need to have seen enough other examples to observe the ways it builds upon and breaks with existing formulas. The ability to fall back on the tried and the true frees the best popular artists to take risk with their audiences and experiment with their materials in search of the more elusive wow.