Vanessa R. Schwartz's Books

Spectacular Realities

Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris

By: Vanessa R. Schwartz

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Spectacular Realities

Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris

By: Vanessa R. Schwartz

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris emerged as the entertainment capital of the world. The sparkling redesigned city fostered a culture of energetic crowd-pleasing and multi-sensory amusements that would apprehend and represent real life as spectacle. Vanessa R. Schwartz examines the explosive popularity of such phenomena as the boulevards, the mass press, public displays of corpses at the morgue, wax museums, panoramas, and early film. Drawing on a wide range of written and visual materials, including private and business archives, and working at the intersections of art history, literature, and cinema studies, Schwartz argues that "spectacular realities" are part of the foundation of modern mass society. She refutes the notion that modern life produced an unending parade of distractions leading to alienation, and instead suggests that crowds gathered not as dislocated spectators but as members of a new kind of crowd, one united in pleasure rather than protest.

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Page Count

252

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520924207

ISBN 13

9780520924208

Jet Age Aesthetic

The Glamour of Media in Motion

By: Vanessa R. Schwartz

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Jet Age Aesthetic

The Glamour of Media in Motion

By: Vanessa R. Schwartz

A stunning look at the profound impact of the jet plane on the mid-century aesthetic, from Disneyland to Life magazine Vanessa R. Schwartz engagingly presents the jet plane’s power to define a new age at a critical moment in the mid-20th century, arguing that the craft’s speed and smooth ride allowed people to imagine themselves living in the future. Exploring realms as diverse as airport architecture, theme park design, film, and photography, Schwartz argues that the jet created an aesthetic that circulated on the ground below. Visual and media culture, including Eero Saarinen’s airports, David Bailey’s photographs of the jet set, and Ernst Haas’s experiments in color photojournalism glamorized the imagery of motion. Drawing on unprecedented access to the archives of The Walt Disney Studios, Schwartz also examines the period’s most successful example of fluid motion meeting media culture: Disneyland. The park’s dedication to “people-moving” defined Walt Disney’s vision, shaping the very identity of the place. The jet age aesthetic laid the groundwork for our contemporary media culture, in which motion is so fluid that we can surf the internet while going nowhere at all.

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Page Count

229

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

030024746X

ISBN 13

9780300247466

Modern France: A Very Short Introduction

By: Vanessa R. Schwartz

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Modern France: A Very Short Introduction

By: Vanessa R. Schwartz

A lively and informative short volume that shows that France is not a faded glory but rather a place that has defined and shaped the key issues of our contemporary world, such as democracy and universal human rights, the emergence of a culture of consumerist spectacle, the tensions between nationalism and contemporary multiculturalism, and the role of religion in the modern state.

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