Postmodernism and popular culture : a cultural history
In this provocative and timely book, John Docker takes his readers on an intellectual adventure. It is a journey that includes an introductory guided tour of the history of modernism, consideration of the development of postmodernism, explanation of the difference between structuralism and poststructuralism and discussion of the debates and conflicts around each. The book engages, in a stimulating and illuminating way, with some of the most important academic debates of our time. It combines polemical force with intellectual rigour, reclaiming popular culture from the forces opposed to it. Postmodernism and Popular Culture examines the attitudes of advocates of modernism and postmodernism, and many allied with the left, to popular culture, and is a detailed and thoughtful analysis of the nature of popular culture itself
xxi, 313 pages ; 24 cm
9780521460453, 9780521465984, 052146045X, 0521465982
30436582
Architectural modernism: Le Corbusier
Literary modernism
Modernism versus popular literature
The Frankfurt school versus Walter Benjamin
Flowering of an orthodoxy
Myths of origin: 1970s screen theory and literary history
Architectural postmodernism: learning from Las Vegas
From Las Vegas to Sydney
Are we living in a postmodern age?
Mapping Frederic Jameson's grand narrative
From structuralism to poststructuralism
Cultural studies: transitional moments from modernism to postmodernism
Bakhtin's carnival
Dilemmas of world upside down. Fools: carnival-theatre-vaudeville-television
Fool, trickster, social explorer: the detective
Crime fiction as changing genre
Melodrama, farce, soap opera
Melodrama in action: prisoner, or cell block H (with Ann Curthoys)