Modernism And Its Media

From cinema and radio broadcasting to the growth of new communication technologies, Modernism and Its Media is the first critical guide to key issues and debates on the changing media contexts of modernist writing. Topics covered include: · Key thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Marshall McLuhan · Modernist film – from Eisenstein to the French New Wave cinema · Modernism and mass culture · The history of modernist media and communication technologies · Modernism's legacies for contemporary new media art With case studies covering such topics as the film writings of Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, popular art and kitsch, the Frankfurt School and the rise of the gramophone, this is an essential guide for students and scholars researching the relationship between modernism and mass media.

What role have communication media played in the formation of modern societies? How should we understand the social impact of new forms of communication and information diffusion, from the advent of printing in fifteenth-century Europe to the expansion of global communication networks today? In this major new work, Thompson addresses these and other questions by elaborating a distinctive social theory of communication media and their impact. He argues that the development of communication media has transformed the spatial and temporal constitution of social life, creating new forms of action and interaction which are no longer linked to the sharing of a common locale. The consequences of this transformation are far-reaching and impinge on many aspects of our lives, from the most intimate aspects of personal experience and self-formation to the changing nature of power and visibility in the public domain. Combining breadth of vision with sensitivity to detail, this book situates the study of the media where it belongs: among a set of disciplines concerned with the emergence, development and structural characteristics of modern societies and their futures.

Though often defined as having opposite aims, means, and effects, modernism and modern propaganda developed at the same time and influenced each other in surprising ways. The professional propagandist emerged as one kind of information specialist, the modernist writer as another. Britain was particularly important to this double history. By secretly hiring well-known writers and intellectuals to write for the government and by exploiting their control of new global information systems, the British in World War I invented a new template for the manipulation of information that remains with us to this day. Making a persuasive case for the importance of understanding modernism in the context of the history of modern propaganda, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda also helps explain the origins of today's highly propagandized world. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda integrates new archival research with fresh interpretations of British fiction and film to provide a comprehensive cultural history of the relationship between modernism and propaganda in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. From works by Joseph Conrad to propaganda films by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Mark Wollaeger traces the transition from literary to cinematic propaganda while offering compelling close readings of major fiction by Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce.

At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for cultural production; the relationship between politics and the category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums, disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and transform each other? What is modernism’s logic of time and contemporaneity, and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty, or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of neo-liberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history? The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism's afterlives and reverberations in the 20th and 21st centuries. The volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, television, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.

New technologies have brought about radical changes in almost all areas of life. The Digimodern period has substantially affected the media as almost every point of life and caused great transformations. At this point, the main theme of the book is to reveal the structure of the media in the digital period.

An examination of the life and work of Marshall McLuhan who coined the term "global village" and, in the light of postmodernism and technology, informed current critical thought regarding the media. Wilmott retraces and synthesizes McLuhan's work and re-reads his literary and cultural projects integrating New Criticism and Marxism into the discourses on art, politics, and technology. Within the context of postmodernism, the critic does not seem as eccentric as he once did in the 1960s and as the author states in the introduction his "self-experiment...uncannily reflects the desires and limits of our own." Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Canadian card order number C95-932946-3. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book adopts a polemical stance. It approaches the problems raised by the media by way of a set of arguments with the two dominant paradigms now current for thinking about the mediaDSpost-modernism and Information Society theory. It argues that the media are important because they raise a set of questions that have been central to social and political theory since the Enlightenment. In a series of probes into different sets of questions raised by the media, the argument of the book focuses on the problem raised by what Kant called the unsocial sociability of human kind. Under what conditions could autonomous, free individuals live in viable social communities. Or to put it another way what are the related scope for, and limits on, human reason and emancipation. In conducting this argument the book first argues for a necessarily historical perspective. It then goes on to examine the implications for emancipation of seeing the media as cultural industries within the wider systems world of the capitalist market economy; of seeing the media as technologies; of the specialisation of intellectual production and of the separation and increasing social distance between the producers and consumers of symbols. It then goes on to argue, against current ethnographic trends in audience research and against the focus on everyday life, for a reinstatement of interest in the statistical reality of audiences and effects, and for a recognition through a return to the Hegelian roots of commodity fetishism, and the symbolic interactionist creation of identities, that an active audience can be actively involved in its own domination. The argument then turns to the problem of how we evaluate the symbolic forms that the media circulate and whether such evaluation can be anything more than a matter of personal taste. It is argued that evaluation is in practice unavoidable and without some standards that are more than just subjective any criticism of the medias performance is impossible. Via an examination of the debate between the sociology of art and aesthetics it argues for the ethical foundations of aesthetic judgement and for the establishment of agreed standards of aesthetic judgement via the discourse ethic that underlies the argument of the entire book. This foregrounding of the discourse ethic then leads on to a discussion of the media and politics. Here the argument is that arguments about the media and politics are at the heart of arguments about politics itself. These arguments focus, it is argued, upon the shifting division between the public and the private. Here the book returns to the roots of public sphere theory in Rousseaus arguments for the centrality of public spectacle and Kants argument for the centrality of public reason in the practice of democratic politics.

While most critical studies of born-digital literature celebrate it as a postmodern art form with roots in contemporary technologies and social interactions, Digital Modernism provides an alternative genealogy. Grounding her argument in literary history, media studies, and the practice of close-reading, Jessica Pressman pairs modernist works by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter to demonstrate how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. Accordingly, Digital Modernism makes the case for considering these digital creations as "literature" and argues for the value of reading them carefully, closely, and within literary history.