Culture in the Age of Three Worlds

Denning's (American studies, Yale) study of the ideological function of culture in the late 20th century takes as its jumping-off point that moment after World War II when, "just as an earlier bourgeois gentleman had been pleasantly surprised to find that he had been speaking prose all along, so now even Americans found that their barbaric yawp was culture. And, what's more, culture mattered this was not your grandparents' culture, the quaint customs and artifacts collected by folklorists. Rather, under its various guises the omnipresent commercial signscape, the unending stream of mass entertainments ... this mass culture was part of the wealth of nations, an engine of what those intoxicated by the new discovery called a 'postindustrial' society." Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Michael Denning teaches American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Mechanic Accents, Cover Stories, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, and The Cultural Front.