"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.

In his highly praised Republic of Mass Culture, James L. Baughman offers a lively analysis of the impact that the advent of television has had on America's media industries. He contends that because television had captured the largest share of the mass audience by the late 1950s, rival media were forced to target smaller, "sub-group" markets with novel content that ranged from rock 'n' roll for teenage radio listeners in the 1950s to the more sexually explicit films that began to appear in the 1960s. For this updated edition, Baughman includes in his discussion the effects of the new competitive realities of the 1990s on journalism, filmmaking, and broadcasting. The dominance of marketplace values, he argues, has further fragmented the mass audience, encouraged record-breaking mergers between media companies, and precipitated a steady and alarming decline in the quality of and public interest in journalism, a trend that may ultimately threaten American democracy.

This anthology offers a rich array of documents, short fiction, poems, songs, plays, movie scripts, comic routines, and folklore to offer a close look at the mass culture that was consumed by millions in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1953. Both state-sponsored cultural forms and the unofficial culture that flourished beneath the surface are represented. The focus is on the entertainment genres that both shaped and reflected the social, political, and personal values of the regime and the masses. The period covered encompasses the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the mixed economy and culture of the 1920s, the tightly controlled Stalinist 1930s, the looser atmosphere of the Great Patriotic War, and the postwar era ending with the death of Stalin. Much of the material appears here in English for the first time. A companion 45-minute audio tape (ISBN 0-253-32911-6) features contemporaneous performances of fifteen popular songs of the time, with such favorites as "Bublichki," "The Blue Kerchief," and "Katyusha." Russian texts of the songs are included in the book.

The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardized all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria by his many detractors. In today's world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno's work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.

From the 1930s to the 50s in Italy commercial cultural products were transformed by new reproductive technologies and ways of marketing and distribution, and the appetite for radio, films, music and magazines boomed. This book uses new evidence to explore possible continuities between the uses of mass culture before and after World War II.

Located on the fringes of Paris, Montmartre attracted artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Steinlen, and Jules Chéret. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the artists in the quarter began to create works blurring the boundaries between fine art and popular illustration, the artist and the audience, as well as class and gender distinctions. The creative expression that ensued was an exuberant mix of high and low-a breeding ground for what is today termed popular culture. The carefully interlocked essays in Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture demonstrate how and why this quarter was at the forefront of such innovation. The contributors bring an unprecedented range of approaches to the topic, from political and religious history to art historical investigations and literary analysis of texts. This project is the first of its kind to examine fully Montmartre's many contributions to the creation of a mass culture that reigned supreme in the twentieth century.

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

From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.