Multiplication: Modernity, Mass Culture, Gender in the United States, 1910-1933

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Ruth Mayer
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441690833

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

This project explored US-American mass culture of the early 20th century with a close attention to their trans-Atlantic circulation and repercussions. It reacts to the correspondences between increasingly professional entertainment formats and the system of Taylorized massproduction, which constituted a point of departure for numerous theoretical approaches to mass culture from the 1910s onward, culminating, arguably, in Siegfried Kracauer’s compelling concept of the ‘mass ornament’ formulated in 1927. What Kracauer and other critics before and after recognized as a core signature of modernity, is addressed by this project as the aesthetics of multiplication. This means to regard mass culture not primarily as the engine of transformation and outbidding that it indubitably also is, but to focus on a mass-cultural productivity that seems purely mechanical and imitative. In contrast to seminal recent theories of mass culture that emphasized pluralization and diversity as its core principles (Makropoulus), this project aimed to valorize and reassess the creative potential of multiplication. In doing so, it also responded to the tendency to juxtapose a ‘good’ (subversive, diverse, plural) popular culture and a ‘bad’ (repetitive, mindless, complacent) mass culture and to tacitly assign this juxtaposition with gendered attributes. Significantly, together with its attendant factors of excess, accrual, and growth (rather than progress), multiplication is often characterized as a feminized quality. It perpetuates and simultaneously complicates the assessment of mass culture ‘as woman’ (Huyssen). The project branched out in three subprojects. SP1 was concerned with the manifestation of the aesthetic of multiplication in the overlapping creative spheres of variety and the illustrated periodical press in close recourse to female agency—dancers, actors, directors, writers, and characters who all make use of ornamentality in ways that cannot be captured in terms of commercial streamlining or totalitarian cooptation. SP2 approached the multiplying force of avant-garde and mass cultural print cultures with a special regard to the cultural work of modernist little magazines. SP3 engaged with the evocative potential of body images in photography and graphic culture on the one hand and the medium of the modernist scrapbook on the other. All three subprojects explored material that has up to now been afforded little scholarly attention and correlated these readings with reassessments of seminal texts of mass-cultural criticism of the early 20th century.

Publications

• Commodification, Corporeality, Crisis? Weimar Modern Girls, Image, and Aesthetic in Cultural Criticism.” The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914–1945, special 2022 issue on the Modern Girl
  Buhl, Lilean
  
• Engineered Desire: The Smart Set, Mass Culture, and the Dispositif of Distraction. Modernity and the Periodical Press, 17-32. BRILL.
  Mayer, Ruth
  
• Fleeting, Fast, and Everywhere: An Introduction to Periodical Modernity. Modernity and the Periodical Press, 1-16. BRILL.
  Brinker, Felix & Mayer, Ruth
  
• Headlines for the Avant-gardes: Mina Loy, Filippo Marinetti, and Kurt Schwitters between Little Magazine Modernism and the Mass Periodical. Modernity and the Periodical Press, 80-100. BRILL.
  Buhl, Lilean
  
• Poetic Parties and Casual Correlations:The Little Reviewand Form. The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 13(2), 205-225.
  Mayer, Ruth
  
• Scrapped: Fragments of Modernity in the Little Magazine Close Up and H.D.’s Scrapbook. Modernity and the Periodical Press, 101-117. BRILL.
  Czelustek, Sabrina
  
• “Against Method.” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 67, no. 1, Spring 2022, pp. 11-13.
  Mayer, Ruth
  
• Backwardness: Rethinking Modernity, Conceptualizing Change. Amerikastudien/American Studies, 68(3), 295-327.
  Mayer, Ruth
  
• Chorus Girl Modernity: Of Salamanders and Periodical Culture. Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, 7(3).
  Mayer, Ruth
  
• Girls Girls Girls Girls Girls: The Trans-Atlantic Mass Magazine Culture of the 1920s as a Gendered Affair. Journal of European Periodical Studies, 7(2).
  Mayer, Ruth
  
• Modernity and the Periodical Press. BRILL.
  Brinker, Felix & Mayer, Ruth
  
• Backwards Modernity: The Crisis , Miscellaneity, and the Legacy of Slavery. The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 15(1), 101-120.
  Mayer, Ruth
  
• Refracting Modernity: An Introduction. The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 15(1), 1-18.
  Buhl, Lilean; Czelustek, Sabrina & Mayer, Ruth