Biography as the Literature of Mass Culture. Leo Löwenthal's Analysis About Culture Industry
Keywords:
culture industry, mass culture, Löwenthal, biographies, literatureAbstract
If you browse through the secondary literature of the Critical Theory of the 30s/40s and search for the aspects of culture industry, most of the time you will be referred to the works of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Especially the famous chapter “culture industry” of Dialectic of Enlightment, which was published in 1947, is mentioned first. Primarily movies, TV and music is at the center of analysis in this chapter. But what is about literature? At this point a less famous member becomes important: Leo Löwenthal. Already in the beginning of the 30s he posed the question in which shape contemporary literature appears in cultural industry. During the 30s and 40s Löwenthal wrote two essays which illustrate that the biography literature is part of mass culture. These works have to correlate with the chapter “culture industry” of Dialectic of Enlightment. The aspects of mass culture, which Horkheimer and Adorno detected in movies and music, theses aspects were evinced by Löwenthal in the biography literature.Downloads
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