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Can I read The mass ornament: Weimar essays on EtoBox?

The mass ornament: Weimar essays by Siegfried Kracauer is a philosophy book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The mass ornament: Weimar essays about?

Siegfried Kracauer was one of the twentieth century's most brilliant cultural critics, a daring and prolific scholar, and an incisive theorist of film. In this volume his finest writings on modern society make their long-awaited appearance in English. This book is a celebration of the masses--their tastes, amusements, and everyday lives. Taking up themes of modernity, such as isolation and alienation, urban culture, and the relation between the group and the individual, Kracauer explores a kaleidoscope of topics: shopping arcades, the cinema, bestsellers and their readers, photography, dance, hotel lobbies, Kafka, the Bible, and boredom. For Kracauer, the most revelatory facets of modern life in the West lie on the surface, in the ephemeral and the marginal. Of special fascination to him is the United States, where he eventually settled after fleeing Germany and whose culture he sees as defined almost exclusively by "the ostentatious display of surface." With these essays, written in the 1920s and early 1930s and edited by the author in 1963, Kracauer was the first to demonstrate that studying the everyday world of the masses can bring great rewards. The

Who reads The mass ornament: Weimar essays?

It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.

Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.

Author
Siegfried Kracauer
Publisher
Mass. ; Harvard University Press
Published
1995
Language
EN
ISBN
9780674551633
Category
philosophy
Subjects
Computer Science, Sociology, Reference
Rating
4.2 / 5 (112 ratings)
Updated
2026-03-14

Other editions & translations

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