Description
Book SynopsisPopular Modernism and Its Legacies reconfigures modernist studies to investigate how modernist concepts, figures, and aesthetics continue to play essential--though often undetected--roles across an array of contemporary works, genres, and mediums. Featuring both established and emerging scholars, each of the book''s three sections offers a distinct perspective on popular modernism. The first section considers popular modernism in periods historically associated with the movement, discovering hidden connections between traditional forms of modernist literature and popular culture. The second section traces modernist genealogies from the past to the contemporary era, ultimately revealing that immensely popular contemporary works, artists, and genres continue to engage and thereby renew modernist aesthetics and values. The final section moves into the 21st century, discovering how popular works invoke modernist techniques, texts, and artists to explore social and existential quand
Trade ReviewAmong the more profound shifts in the general fields of literary, theoretical and cultural studies in the past two decades has been the rethinking of Modernism beyond its narrowest period restrictions, as a between-the-wars phenomenon, say, and into its multiplicity, into Modernisms.
Popular Modernism and its Legacy: from Pop Culture to Video Games is a major contribution to that ongoing discourse as it re-examines and re-evaluates what is too often considered an elitist, formalist or technical literature in terms of its broader ramifications, as “Popular Modernism.” This collection of essays is a major contribution to reshaping that discourse and will be welcomed and embraced not only by students, scholars and teachers of Modernism but by those of Popular Culture as well, as it closes the artificial divide separating high and low cultures, where modernist novels coexist with contemporary comics and where Charlie Chaplin meets Walter Benjamin. * S. E. Gontarski, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University, USA *
Popular Modernism and Its Legacies maps with verve and insight crucial sites where modernism and mass culture merged indistinguishably, and demonstrates that the resulting hybrids still have much to teach us about how to understand our recent past and how to inhabit our conflicted present. Ranging over a broad variety of texts and media—from TV series and comic books to popular music, Hollywood films and video games—the essays in this exciting collection combine fine-grained textual analysis, historical awareness, and theoretical sophistication. They cast new light on well-known texts and figures (Chaplin, Josephine Baker), reveal the presence of classic modernist concerns in contemporary media, and chart unheeded formations, such as the experimental radio drama, the modernist operetta, or 'Surf Noir.' Above all, they manage to keep modernism surprising, alive, and unpredictable. * Juan Antonio Suárez, Professor of English, University of Murcia, Spain *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Illustrations
Introduction Of Titanics, Wars, Downturns, and Downtons: Popular Modernism and Its Legacies
Scott Ortolano, Florida SouthWestern State College, USA Section I: New Visions of Popular Modernism 1 Gentry Modernism: Cultural Connoisseurship and Midcentury Masculinity, 1951-57
Marsha Bryant, University of Florida, USA 2 Modernism, Operetta and Ruritania: Ivor Novello’s
Glamorous Night Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin, Ireland 3 Fine Art on the Airwaves: Radio Drama and Modern(ist) Mass Culture
Adam Nemmers, Texas Christian University, USA 4 “I'm Gonna Be Somebody,” 1930: Gangsters and Modernist Celebrity
Jonathan Goldman, New York Institute of Technology, USA 5 Charlie Chaplin, Walter Benjamin, and the Redemption of the City
Barry Faulk, Florida State University, USA Section II: Legacies of Popular Modernism 6 “Catch a Wave”: Surf Noir, Los Angeles, and Modernist Nostalgia
Kirk Curnutt, Troy University, USA 7 Alien Pleasures: Modernism/Hybridity/Science Fiction
Paul March-Russell, University of Kent, UK 8 Josephine Baker’s Contemporary Afterlives: Black Female Identity, Modernist Performance, and Popular Legacies of the Jazz Age
Asimina Ino Nikolopoulou, Tufts University, USA 9 A Hitchhiker's Guide to Modernism: The Futuristic Fordisms of Aldous Huxley, Brian O'Nolan, and Douglas Adams
Andrew McFeaters, Broward College, USA Section III: Resonances of Popular Modernism in the Twenty-First Century 10 Smokescreens to Smokestacks:
True Detective and the American Sublime
Caroline Blinder, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK 11 Of Modernist Second Acts and African American Lives: F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Wire, and the Struggle against Lockdown
Walter Bosse, Brescia University, USA 12 Don Draper’s Identity Crisis and
Mad Men’s Modernist Masculinity
Camelia Raghinaru, Concordia University, USA 13 A Century of Reading Time: From Modernist Novels to Contemporary Comics
Aimee Armande Wilson, University of Kansas, USA 14 Hemingway’s Console: Memory and Ethics in the Modernist Video Game
Dustin Anderson, Georgia Southern University, USA Afterword Faye Hammill, University of Strathclyde, UK
