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This book is a sustained exploration of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “small” forms across journalism, criticism, and popular theater. Ethel Matala de Mazza foregrounds the function of a range of “minor” genres in reflecting upon the democratic promise to involve mass publics in cultural and political life, what she calls the “popular pact.” A central goal of this book is thus to reconstruct the history of modernity as a discontinuous, fractured history of distinct public spheres; as Matala de Mazza proposes, small forms’ mosaic-like structure better captures such historical discontinuities than grand narratives. The public spaces (Öffentlichkeiten) of modernity enable contestations and negotiations (Verhandlungen) between different representational modes and media. Tracking these negotiations entails attending to how “low,” popular forms play themselves off of “high,” serious forms, and how the self-images of mass culture remain ambiguous and capable of accommodating various political status quos. The concerns of this book draw on Matala de Mazza’s substantial comparatist work on figurations of the political body. This book is likewise an important touchstone for a growing body of recent studies of small forms (the author plays a leadership role at the Berlin-based Graduiertenkolleg on the “Literatur- und Wissensgeschichte kleiner Formen”).
Der populäre Pakt is a compelling mixture of intellectual and cultural history, with a clear emphasis on the Frankfurt School and its interlocutors (Lukács, Weber, Schmitt). But rather than providing a genealogy of an intellectual school, the book is a history of specific engagements with popular culture in particular historical and medial contexts. It is also a genealogy of a set of critical forms. It is here that Siegfried Kracauer, and to a lesser extent Heine, Benjamin,...