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The Sale of Two Cities: A Semiotic Comparison of Disneyland with Marriott's Great America
Author(s) -
Mechling Elizabeth Walker,
Mechling Jay
Publication year - 1981
Publication title -
the journal of popular culture
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.238
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1540-5931
pISSN - 0022-3840
DOI - 10.1111/j.0022-3840.1981.00166.x
Subject(s) - semiotics , theme (computing) , reading (process) , marxist philosophy , history , bourgeoisie , sociology , media studies , aesthetics , art history , art , law , philosophy , political science , epistemology , politics , computer science , operating system
Much is revealed through the contrast of two related but divergent forms. In this essay, Elizabeth Mechlingand Jay Mechlingcontrast Disneyland with a later but more loosely themed park, Marriott's Great America in Santa Clara, California. Using the perspectives and methods of semiotics in Louis Marin's Marxist reading, this essay asks, “What are the stories that Disneyland and Marriott's Great America tell?…the ways in which popular culture both teaches and evokes stories that ‘think themselves’ in our minds.” These two parks, though allied in the theme format and rooted in a common bourgeois capitalist culture, are found to promote very different attitudes and values.