فرهنگ آمریکایی، سلیقه‌های آمریکایی: تغییرات اجتماعی و قرن بیستم

In American Culture, American Tastes , Michael Kammen leads us on an entertaining, thought-provoking tour of America's changing tastes, uses of leisure, and the shifting perceptions that have accompanied them throughout our nation's history. Starting at the point in time that late-nineteenth-century popular culture began to evolve into post-WWII mass culture, Kammen charts the influence of advertising and opinion polling; the development of standardized products, shopping centers, and mass marketing; the separation of youth and adult culture; the relationship between "high" and "low" art; the commercialization of organized entertainment; and the ways in which television has shaped mass culture and consumerism has reconfigured it. In doing so, he draws from sources as varied and rich as the work of esteemed cultural theorists, "The Simpsons," jigsaw puzzles, Walter Winchell's gossip columns, Whitman's poetry, Warhol's art, "Sesame Street," and the Book-of-the-Month Club. With wit and ingenuity Kammen traces the emergence of American mass culture and the contested meanings of leisure, taste, consumer culture, and social divisions that it has spawned. "Americans have a long history of public arguments about taste, the uses of leisure, and what is culturally appropriate in a democracy that has a strong work ethic. Michael Kammen surveys these debates as well as our changing taste preferences, especially in the past century, and the shifting perceptions that have accompanied them."--BOOK JACKET. "Focusing on our own time, Kammen discusses the use of the fluid nature of cultural taste to enlarge audiences and increase revenues, and reveals how the public role of intellectuals and cultural critics has declined as the power of corporate sponsors and promoters has risen. As a result of this diminution of cultural authority, he says, definitive pronouncements have been replaced by divergent points of view, and there is, as well, a tendency to blur fact and fiction, reality and illusion."--Jacket Comming to terms with defining terms Culture democratized: distinction or degradation? Consumerism, Americanism, and the phasing of popular culture Popular culture in transition and in its prime Blurring the boundaries between taste levels Cultural criticism and the transformation of cultural authority The gradual emergence of mass culture and its critics Mass culture in more recent times: passive and/or participatory? Historians and the problem of popular culture in recent times Meetings of the minds? Moving beyond cusutomary categories. A decade ago, when I began to teach courses on the evolution of taste levels and cultural stratification in the United States-courses con with culture in a democratic society, the society, the commodification of culture, the changing nature and uses of leisure, culture and national identity, those kinds of issues-a troublesome lack of definitional clar and precision in the pertinent literature quickly became apparent. A distinguished historian traces the changing world of American leisure, from the 1880s to the evolution of mass culture following World War II, and examines the impact of opinion polls and advertising, the development of shopping centers, and other factors on the nature of cultural taste. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.