Popular Modernity in America: Experience, Technology, Mythohistory

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SUNY Press, Sep 28, 2000 - Technology & Engineering - 237 pages
Does technology alter our ways of being in and perceiving the world, or does it merely serve as a conduit for predetermined patterns of culture? In addressing this question, Popular Modernity in America examines a broad range of related cultural and technological phenomena--from Bing Crosby to Ice Cube, from the invention of the telegraph to the celebratory heralding of the internet in the 1990s--that have helped shape American popular culture over the past 150 years. Throughout, it avoids the binaries that label popular culture as inherently liberatory or subtly oppressive, arguing instead for the triadic relationship of experience, technology, and myth, each of which has an active role to play in how we interact with popular culture.
 

Contents

Coughlin Crosby
33
The Scopic Regime
89
Black American
139
The Narrative Imperative
171
Works Consulted
203
Index
231
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About the author (2000)

Michael Thomas Carroll is Associate Professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University. He is the editor of No Small World: Visions and Revisions of World Literature, and coeditor of Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture.

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