Postmodernism and Popular Culture

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.

Preface; Introduction; Part I. Modernism in Conflict: 1. Architectural modernism; 2. Literary modernism; 3. Modernism versus popular literture; 4. The Frankfurt School versus Walter Benjamin; 5. Flowering of an orthodoxy; 6. Myths of origin; 1970s screen theory and literary history; Part II. Modernism and Postmodernism: 7. Architectural postmodernism: learning from Las Vegas; 8. From Las Vegas to Sydney; 9. Are we living in a Postmodern Age?; 10. Mapping Frederic Jameson's grand narrative; 11. From structuralism to postructuralism: Derrida; 12. Cultural studies; Transitional moments from modernism to postmodernism; Part III. Carnival: 13. Bakhtin's carnival; 14. Dilemmas of a world upside fown; 15. Fools: carnival-theatre-Vaudeville-television; 16. Fool, trickster, social explorer - the detective; 17. Crime fiction as a changing genre; 18. Melodrama, farce, soap opera; 19. Melodrama in action: Prisoner or Cell Block H; Conclusion: Carnival and contemporary popular culture; Notes; Index.