MTU Cork Library Catalogue

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Kitsch! : cultural politics and taste / Ruth Holliday and Tracey Potts.

By: Holliday, Ruth.
Contributor(s): Potts, Tracey.
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookPublisher: Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press, c2012Description: xiii, 266 p., [4] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 22 cm.ISBN: 9780719066160 (pbk); 0719066166 (pbk); 9780719066153 (hbk); 0719066158.Subject(s): Kitsch | Aesthetics | Decoration and ornament | Art and popular cultureDDC classification: 709.04013
Contents:
1. Introduction -- 2. Kitsch taste -- 3. Kitsch-man -- 4. Camp kitsch -- 5. Cool kitsch -- 6. Disaster kitsch -- 7. Conclusion.
Summary: This book explores the changing significance of kitsch. With its unique approach to its subject, Kitsch!: Cultural Politics and Taste promises to advance debates in cultural studies and sociology around taste, while providing an invaluable introduction for students.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
General Lending MTU Crawford College of Art and Design Library Lending 709.04013 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 00195903
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From bottle gardens, the bachelor pad and Batman to designer gnomes and monogamy spray, this book uses a diverse range of objects to explore the changing significance of kitsch. With its unique approach to its subject, Kitsch! Cultural politics and taste promises to advance debates in cultural studies and sociology around taste, while providing an invaluable introduction for students and interested readers.

Kitsch! examines how the idea of kitsch is mobilised - progressively, as bad taste, as camp and as cool - to inform notions of identity and sensibility. Where most studies proceed from the kitsch object, this book takes the moment of aesthetic judgement as its starting point and attempts to identify the ideological work performed by the category itself. The book poses the strongest challenge to those who argue that taste is democratised in contemporary culture, offering ample evidence that judgements of taste have shifted ground rather than relaxed.

Above all, the story of kitsch proposed by the authors is intended to disturb kitsch's reputation as the source of a ready-made sensibility and politics. Kitsch has a history and not, as it has been supposed, an essence and is consequently the site of love, hate, joy, exasperation, irony, nausea and all of the twisted possibilities between.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-260) and index.

1. Introduction -- 2. Kitsch taste -- 3. Kitsch-man -- 4. Camp kitsch -- 5. Cool kitsch -- 6. Disaster kitsch -- 7. Conclusion.

This book explores the changing significance of kitsch. With its unique approach to its subject, Kitsch!: Cultural Politics and Taste promises to advance debates in cultural studies and sociology around taste, while providing an invaluable introduction for students.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

  • List of figures (p. ix)
  • List of colour plates (p. xi)
  • Acknowledgements (p. xiii)
  • 1 Introduction (p. 1)
  • 2 Kitsch taste (p. 45)
  • 3 Kitsch-man (p. 82)
  • 4 Camp kitsch (p. 115)
  • 5 Cool kitsch (p. 154)
  • 6 Disaster kitsch (p. 195)
  • 7 Conclusion (p. 237)
  • Bibliography (p. 247)
  • Index (p. 261)

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Ruth Holliday is Professor of Gender and Culture in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds
Tracey Potts is Lecturer in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham

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