Summary
Contents
Subject index
This timely volume provides a framework for understanding the cultural turn in terms of the classical legacy, contemporary cultural theory, and cultural analysis. It reveals the significance of Marxist humanism, Georg Simmel, the Frankfurt School, Stuart Hall, and the Birmingham School, Giddens, Bauman, Foucault, Bourdieu and Baudrillard. Readers receive a dazzling, critical survey of some of the primary figures in the field. However, the book is much more than a rough guide tour through the ‘great figures’ in the field. Through an analysis of specific problems, such as transculturalism, transnationalism, feminism, popular music, and cultural citizenship, it demonstrates the relevance of cultural sociology in elucidating some of the key questions of our time.
The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School
The ‘Frankfurt School’ refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that have occurred since the classical theory of Marx.1 Working at the Institut for Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor. W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, and Erich Fromm analyzed a wide variety of cultural phenomena, ranging from mass culture and communication to classical music and literature. While Adorno, Löwenthal, and Marcuse are well known as literary theorists, the Frankfurt School also produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. In their theory ...
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