Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture - Hardcover

Pells, Richard

3.62

16 ratings by Goodreads

9780300115048: Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300115040 ISBN 13: 9780300115048

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2011

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America's global cultural impact is largely seen as one-sided, with critics claiming that it has undermined other countries' languages and traditions. But contrary to popular belief, the cultural relationship between the United States and the world has been reciprocal, says Richard Pells. The United States not only plays a large role in shaping international entertainment and tastes, it is also a consumer of foreign intellectual and artistic influences.

Pells reveals how the American artists, novelists, composers, jazz musicians, and filmmakers who were part of the Modernist movement were greatly influenced by outside ideas and techniques. People across the globe found familiarities in American entertainment, resulting in a universal culture that has dominated the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and fulfilled the aim of the Modernist movement—to make the modern world seem more intelligible.

Modernist America brilliantly explains why George Gershwin's music, Cole Porter's lyrics, Jackson Pollock's paintings, Bob Fosse's choreography, Marlon Brando's acting, and Orson Welles's storytelling were so influential, and why these and other artists and entertainers simultaneously represent both an American and a modern global culture.

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About the Author:

Richard Pells is professor of history emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Austin, TX.

Review:

“[T]here is much to enjoy here . . . a rousing jaunt through a period of remarkable upheavals in entertainment and the arts.”—The Wall Street Journal (The Wall Street Journal)

"Richard Pells's book leaps, lunges, gallops, and, once in a while, pirouettes its way toward something very close toa unified field theory of twentieth-century American culture."—Gene Seymour, Bookforum (Gene Seymour Bookforum)

"Pells has written a capacious, original, even compelling book...there is nothing like this in print."—Daniel Horowitz, Smith College (Daniel Horowitz)

"Richard Pells was one of the first scholars to teach us the importance of looking beyond national boundaries in writing the history of American culture. Now he has valuably extended that lesson in this rich, accessible study of modernism’s transatlantic reach."—Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester (Joan Shelley Rubin)

"In his cosmopolitan study of American modernism, Richard Pells reveals the open borders for artistic work. With his impressive command of several art forms, high and popular, he illuminates the transnational circuitry of artistic borrowing and innovation."—Thomas Bender, author of New York Intellect (Thomas Bender)

“By showing that American modernism emerged as part of an international artistic movement, Richard Pells provides an important contribution to the growing scholarly literature on the globalization of American culture.”—Elaine Tyler May, author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation (Elaine Tyler May)

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