The article discusses questions concerning the cultural public sphere in relation to empirical material from a media ethnography of young menąs use of extremely violent action and horror films on video, and how the young men's cultural practices, including media reception and film swapping, relates to their cultural production in the form of fanzines and amateur video films. The aim is to analyse this practice of film swapping, fanzine writing and amateur video making, in terms of cultural publicness, in order to shed light on those micro processes of communication that result in the formation of public spheres of various kinds. In the first part of the article some theoretical implications of the concepts cultural and political public spheres are discussed. Then follows a discussion on the internal communicative patterns within this alternative cultural public sphere, organised informally around fanzines and amateur video festivals. The dynamic relation between this alternative public sphere and other public formations, alternative as well as dominating or bourgeois, is then dealt with, and the different approaches among the various individuals is discussed. This is then followed by a discussion on the alternative cultural public's relation to the market and state systems. Lastly, some general conclusions are drawn, covering the need to analytically separate cultural and political public spheres in order not to forget the task of the cultural public in mediating between market system and lifeworld, and thus not to dismiss the political implications of the cultural.

In diesem Band sind zwölf kultur-, literatur- und geschichtswissenschaftliche Beiträge versammelt, die das Thema Stadt in unterschiedlichen Kontexten zum Inhalt haben.

Der Schwierpunkt liegt auf Nordeuropa, auf Städten wie Stockholm, Kopenhagen oder St. Petersburg. Erfasst werden urbane Spezifika sowie historische Verbindungen und gegenwärtige Beziehungen, nich zuletzt stehen die künstlerischen Annäherungen an Städte im Fokus.

Das gemeinsame Thema is die Herstellung von Bildern des Städtischen, ihre bewusste Erzeugung und Zielgerichtete Verwendung, woraus sich der Begriff der „inszenierten“ Stadt ableitet.

Dabei ist nicht nur an massenmediale Umsetzungen und Städtemarketing zu denken oder an der „entwirklichte“ oder „entstofflichte“ Darstellung der Stadt in Literatur und Film, sondern gerade auch an die Städtebilder, welche die urbane Wahrnehmung mit Hilfe von Kollektivsymbolen, Stereotypen, Metaphem oder elementaren narrativen Einheiten vorstrukturieren.

The article reports findings from a pilot study of the discourse on Kosovo in four leading dailies from four countries: Greece, Norway, Sweden and the UK. A combined discourse and propaganda analysis approach is applied to the first three days' coverage of the NATO bombing campaign, with the aim of studying how the various national/local contexts influenced the media discourse's relationship to the propaganda discourse in the conflict. This problematic is relevant for the current discussion on globalization and superpower dominance in connection with transnational war journalism.