The Differentiation of Modernism: Postwar German Media Arts (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture, 140) - Hardcover

Powell, Professor Larson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1571135723 ISBN 13: 9781571135728

Publisher: Camden House, 2013

Synopsis

After 1945, the purist "medium specificity" of high modernism increasingly yielded to the mixed forms of intermediality. Theodor Adorno dubbed this development a "Verfransung," or "fraying of boundaries," between the arts. The Differentiation of Modernism analyzes this phenomenon in German electronic media arts of the late modernist period (1945-80): in radio plays, film music, and electronic music. The first part of the book begins with a chapter on Adorno's theory of radio as an instrument of democratization, going on to analyze the relationship of the Hörspiel or radio play to electronic music. In the second part, on film music, a chapter on Adorno and Eisler's Composing for the Film sets the parameters for chapters on the film Das Mädchen Rosemarie (1957) and on the music films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The third part examines the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and its relationship to radio, abstract painting, recording technology, and theatrical happenings. The book's central notion of the "differentiation of culture" suggests that late modernism, unlike high modernism, accepted the contingency of modern mass-media driven society and sought to find new forms for it. Larson Powell is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature (Camden House, 2008).

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Review:

(D)ense and thought-provoking . . . . Powell's meta-formalist readings of his chosen canon (are) always thought-provoking and at times brilliant. MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW

About this edition

• Publisher: Camden House
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1571135723
• ISBN 13: 9781571135728
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 262