Kyle A. Hammonds Signs a Publishing Contract with Lexington Books

This past week, Kyle signed a contract with Lexington Books to write and publish his first solo monograph, tentatively titled An American Knightmare: Joker, and the Hermeneutic of Kynicism in Popular Culture.

The contract

Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, publishes scholarly monographs across the humanities and social sciences. The book has no official release date yet. The current target is a late 2023 publication.

About the planned book

The project examines how online fan communities argue over the meaning of mainstream films, and how those arguments can either widen or narrow the space for democratic conversation. The book builds on Kyle's dissertation work on Todd Phillips's Joker (2019) and the splintered fan response that followed it.

Initial synopsis

Meta-talk about communal stories has been a longstanding mode of human value-sharing; however, growing splintering of perspective in the postmodern world has rendered the meaning of shared stories open to a plethora of interpretations. The major argument of this book is that media criticism, a type of communicative meta-talk, may act as a catalyst bridging moral reasoning and civic discourse. Applications of these criticisms may either be beneficial or detrimental to democratic reasoning depending on the way that a community interprets the meaning of a text.

Specifically, this book draws on the example of white nationalist movie fans' virtual criticism of Todd Phillips' film Joker (2019) to demonstrate that anti-democratic modes of film interpretation can facilitate discursive linkages between “filmosophy” and advocating racism, bigotry, and sexism. The type of communal meaning-making that these racist fan groups utilize is a communication strategy that the author identifies as the “hermeneutic of kynicism.” In response to this concerning interpretive framework, the pragmatic suggestions of the book involve deconstructing the hermeneutic of kynicism and alternatively advocating more hopeful and caring interpretive strategies to be adopted by fans, scholars, and fan-scholars alike.