Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization

Introduction.

Part I: The Modern Self.

1. The Theatrical Self: social drama and personal identity.

2. Subjects and Citizens: the politics of everyday life.

3. Street People: the city as experience, dream and nightmare.

4. The Consolations of Consumerism.

5.'We Are Born Naked - Everything Else is Drag': clothing the body, fashioning the self.

6. The Seduction of Romance: fictions of love, narratives of selfhood.

Part II: The Modern Age.

7. Sacred, Secular, Sublime: modernity performs the death of God.

8. Machines and Skyscrapers: technology as experience, hope and fear.

9. From Enlightenment to Holocaust: modernity and the end of morality.

10. Modernism, Art and Culture.

11. The Image, the Spectral, and the Spectacle: technologies of the visual.

12. Postmodern Times?.

Key Terms.

Biographical Notes.

Guide to Further Reading.