"The twelve essays in Modernity and Mass Culture provide a broad and captivating overview of what has come to be known as culture studies." --Texas Journal This is a wide-ranging analysis of the relationship among industrialization, democracy, and art in the 20th century. U.S. and British scholars discuss the interaction of "high," "popular," and "mass" art, showing how Western culture as a whole is affected by the transition from the modern to the postmodern era.
"One of the most comprehensive and intelligent postmodern critics of art and literature, Huyssen collects here a series of his essays on pomo . . . " —Village Voice Literary Supplement " . . . his work remains alert to the problematic relationship obtaining between marxisms and poststructuralisms." —American Literary History " . . . challenging and astute." —World Literature Today "Huyssen's level-headed account of this controversial constellation of critical voices brings welcome clarification to today's murky haze of cultural discussion and proves definitively that commentary from the tradition of the German Left has an indispensable role to play in contemporary criticism." —The German Quarterly " . . . we will certainly have, after reading this book, a deeper understanding of the forces that have led up to the present and of the possibilities still open to us." —Critical Texts " . . . a rich, multifaceted study." —The Year's Work in English Studies Huyssen argues that postmodernism cannot be regarded as a radical break with the past, as it is deeply indebted to that other trend within the culture of modernity—the historical avant-garde.
Cormack investigates the broad cultural significance and relevance of academic sociology by examining its on-going relationship with modernity and mass culture.
The papers in this collection have a common theme in the question of modernity and mass culture. Two papers, those by Chaney and Featherstone respectively, discuss aspects of this theme in a general, global context, all the others are concerned more specifically with the regional context of the Middle East. All the articles in this collection were
How did explicit sexual representation become acceptable in the twentieth century as art rather than pornography? Allison Pease answers this question by tracing the relationship between aesthetics and obscenity from the 1700s onwards, highlighting the way in which early twentieth-century writers incorporated a sexually explicit discourse into their work. Pease explores how artists such as Swinburne, Aubrey Beardsley, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence were responsible for shifting the boundaries between aesthetics and pornography that first became of intellectual interest in the eighteenth century and reinforced class distinctions. Her analysis of canonical works, such as Joyce's Ulysses and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, is framed by a wide-ranging examination of the changing conceptions of aesthetics from Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Kant to F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot. Based on extensive archival work, the book includes examples of period art and illustrations which eloquently demonstrate the shift in public taste and tolerance.
Is popular culture merely a process of creating, marketing, and consuming a final product, or is it an expression of the artist's surroundings and an attempt to alter them? Noted Argentine/Mexican anthropologist Néstor García Canclini addresses these questions and more in Transforming Modernity, a translation of Las culturas populares en el capitalismo. Based on fieldwork among the Purépecha of Michoacán, Mexico, some of the most talented artisans of the New World, the book is not so much a work of ethnography as of philosophy—a cultural critique of modernism. García Canclini delineates three interpretations of popular culture: spontaneous creation, which posits that artistic expression is the realization of beauty and knowledge; "memory for sale," which holds that original products are created for sale in the imposed capitalist system; and the tourist outlook, whereby collectibles are created to justify development and to provide insight into what capitalism has achieved. Transforming Modernity argues strongly for popular culture as an instrument of understanding, reproducing, and transforming the social system in order to elaborate and construct class hegemony and to reflect the unequal appropriation and distribution of cultural capital. With its wide scope, this book should appeal to readers within and well beyond anthropology—those interested in cultural theory, social thought, and Mesoamerican culture.
"An exciting, innovative, and significant work. The author points to how the crowd experience transcended class and gender divisions and was transformed from acts of collective violence into acts of collective consumption."—Michael B. Miller, author of Shanghai on the Métro
This book presents a critical analysis of the relation between sociological theory and recent debates in cultural studies. A distinctive sociological perspective is developed based on the work of Marx, Weber, Bourdieu and Bakhtin. The book examines the problems of theorising issues such as modernity, mass culture and postmodernity by advocating a historical and context-based approach.
This book explores the role of periodicals in the negotiation of modernity during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and considers diverse materials from both sides of the Atlantic, including modernist magazines, advertising campaigns, comics, and scrapbooks.
