Culture in the Age of Three Worlds

by Denning, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781859844496
• ISBN10: 1859844499
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-02-17
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

Over the last half of the twentieth century, culture moved to the foreground of political and intellectual life. Suddenly everyone discovered that culture had been mass produced like Ford's cars; the masses had culture and culture had a mass. Culture was everywhere, no longer the property of the cultured or the cultivated. Radical social movements around the globe invented a politics of culture.Culture In the Age of Three Worlds is a reflection on this cultural turn which was a fundamental aspect of the age of three worlds, that short half century between 1945 and 1989 when it was imagined that the world was divided into three the capitalist first world, the communist second world, and the decolonizing third world. Recasting the legacies of British cultural studies and the radical traditions of the American studies movement in a global context, Michael Denning explores the political and intellectual battles over the meanings of culture, addresses the rise of a distinctive 'American ideology,' and charts the lineaments of the global cultures that emerged as three worlds gave way to one.

Author Biography

Michael Denning is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University

Table of Contents

1 Introduction	1	(16)
PART ONE Rethinking the Age of Three Worlds
2 Globalization and Culture: Process and Epoch	17	(18)
3 A Global Left? Social Movements in the Age of Three Worlds	35	(16)
4 The Novelists' International	51	(24)
PART TWO Working on Culture
5 The Socioanalysis of Culture: Rethinking the Cultural Turn	75	(22)
6 The End of Mass Culture	97	(24)
7 The Academic Left and the Rise of Cultural Studies	121	(26)
8 What's Wrong with Cultural Studies?	147	(22)
PART THREE The American Ideology: The Age of Three Worlds as the American Century
9 "The Special American Conditions": Marxism and American Studies	169	(23)
10 The Peculiarities of the Americans: Reconsidering Democracy in America	192	(17)
11 Neither Capitalist Nor American: The Democracy as Social Movement	209	(18)
12 A Cultural Front in the Age of Three Worlds?	227	(8)
Notes	235	(34)
Acknowledgments	269	(3)
Index	272