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FormatBook Chapter
Author, AnalyticKaes, Anton
Title, AnalyticMass Culture and Modernity: Notes Toward a Social History of Early American and German Cinema
Author, MonographicTrommler, Frank//McVeigh, Joseph
Title, MonographicAmerica and the Germans
Place of PublicationPhiladelphia
PublisherUniv. of Pennsylvania Press
Date of Publication1985
Volume IDVol. 2
Location in Work317-332
AbstractThe author examines the specific historical and social function of the emerging mass culture in the US and Germany from the 1890s to the 1920s. The focus in not only with an archaeology of the past but equally, with a "history of the present." The changing attitudes of the German intellectuals of the 1920s toward American mass culture captured an ambivalence that has characterized debates about its social functions to the present day. On the one hand, the fictional world of mass culture is able to offer critical often carnivalesque perspectives and utopian alternatives to our necessarily constrained social and emontional lives; on the other, it functions as an all-encompassing and often cynical apparatus for the social control and manipulation of legitimate desires. Even though we may no longer believe in mass culture as the prime mover for the democratization of life in Germany or the US, it seems that the debate about its historical functions is far from over
Call NumberMKI/SHS E 184 .G3 A39 1985
MKI TermsHistory/ Culture/ Media