Pop Modernism examines the popular roots of modernism in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including experimental movies, pop songs, photographs, and well-known poems and paintings, Juan A. Suárez reveals that experimental art in the early twentieth century was centrally concerned with the reinvention of everyday life. Suárez demonstrates how modernist writers and artists reworked pop images and sounds, old-fashioned and factory-made objects, city spaces, and the languages and styles of queer and ethnic “others.” Along the way, he reinterprets many of modernism’s major figures and argues for the centrality of relatively marginal ones, such as Vachel Lindsay, Charles Henri Ford, Helen Levitt, and James Agee. As Suárez shows, what’s at stake is not just an antiquarian impulse to rescue forgotten past moments and works, but a desire to establish an archaeology of our present art, culture, and activism.

Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reconfigures modernist studies to investigate how modernist concepts, figures, and aesthetics continue to play essential--though often undetected--roles across an array of contemporary works, genres, and mediums. Featuring both established and emerging scholars, each of the book's three sections offers a distinct perspective on popular modernism. The first section considers popular modernism in periods historically associated with the movement, discovering hidden connections between traditional forms of modernist literature and popular culture. The second section traces modernist genealogies from the past to the contemporary era, ultimately revealing that immensely popular contemporary works, artists, and genres continue to engage and thereby renew modernist aesthetics and values. The final section moves into the 21st century, discovering how popular works invoke modernist techniques, texts, and artists to explore social and existential quandaries in the contemporary world. Concluding with an afterword from noted scholar Faye Hammill, Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reshapes the study of modernism and provides new perspectives on important works at the center of our cultural imagination.

This book offers an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to Pop art scholarship through a recuperation of popular music into art historical understandings of the movement. Jukebox modernism is a procedure by which Pop artists used popular music within their works to disrupt decorous modernism during the sixties. Artists, including Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol, respond to popular music for reasons such as its emotional connectivity, issues of fandom and identity, and the pleasures and problems of looking and listening to an artwork. When we both look at and listen to Pop art, essential aspects of Pop’s history that have been neglected—its sounds, its women, its queerness, and its black subjects—come into focus.

Modernism in music still arouses passions and is riven by controversies. Taking root in the early decades of the twentieth century, it achieved ideological dominance for almost three decades following the Second World War, before becoming the object of widespread critique in the last two decades of the century, both from critics and composers of a postmodern persuasion and from prominent scholars associated with the ‘new musicology’. Yet these critiques have failed to dampen its ongoing resilience. The picture of modernism has considerably broadened and diversified, and has remained a pivotal focus of debate well into the twenty-first century. This Research Companion does not seek to limit what musical modernism might be. At the same time, it resists any dilution of the term that would see its indiscriminate application to practically any and all music of a certain period. In addition to addressing issues already well established in modernist studies such as aesthetics, history, institutions, place, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, production and performance, communication technologies and the interface with postmodernism, this volume also explores topics that are less established; among them: modernism and affect, modernism and comedy, modernism versus the ‘contemporary’, and the crucial distinction between modernism in popular culture and a ‘popular modernism’, a modernism of the people. In doing so, this text seeks to define modernism in music by probing its margins as much as by restating its supposed essence.

"Postmodernism" has become the buzzword of contemporary society. Yet it remains baffling in its variety of definitions, contexts and associations. Beginning Postmodernism aims to offer clear, accessible and step-by-step introductions to postmodernism across a wide range of subjects. It encourages readers to explore how the debates about postmodernism have emerged from basic philosophical and cultural ideas. With its emphasis firmly on "postmodernism in practice," the book contains exercises and questions designed to help readers understand and reflect upon a variety of positions in the following areas of contemporary culture: philosophy and cultural theory; architecture and concepts of space; visual art; sculpture and the design arts; popular culture and music; film, video and television culture; and the social sciences.

British Pop Art was seen as an integral, even central, part of social change in the Sixties. It was a movement that developed innovative ways of dealing with reality, both reflecting on and participating in the culture. Its aesthetics was often homogeneous with the industrial, with the mass-produced, and, hence, with the artificial, manufactured character of the urban environment. This discontinuity in the traditional approach towards artistic creation furthered the globalization of diversity, which constitutes the abiding concerns of postmodern art. Drawing from postmodern thought and cultural analysis, this book critically examines British Pop Art within the broad interdisciplinary domain of the social and cultural changes that led to flexibility in conceptualization, and provides a contribution to the artistic processes which form and deform the cultural sphere, confirming its relevance to current debates in which questions of postmodern aesthetics prominently figure.