Correspondence and Difference

Advertising strategically reroutes media, popular culture, values, and social relations to create new meanings housed within commodity-signs. Chapter Three addresses this recontextualization of cultural and social meaning through an intertextual analysis of dance in advertising, examining how advertising employs dance through quotation, allusion, and parody. Detailed analyses of several examples demonstrates how correspondence and difference produce affect and contribute to viewers’ pleasure by enabling a proliferation of meanings. Thus ads offer the opportunity to look closely at advertising’s participation in the ongoing construction of meaning in popular culture. The chapter introduces the concept of nostalgia without memory and demonstrates how textual borrowings or appropriations reveal the cultural relevance of dance-in-advertising as sites of production that engage in a rewriting of cultural histories.