Transformations of the Popular (DFG SFB 1472)

The aim of the SFB Transformations of the Popular (Lead Agency: University of Siegen) is to develop an interdisciplinary cultural theory of the popular, which enables the humanities and social sciences as well as the social actors to observe the social role of the popular. The project Prefigurations of Pop in Entertainment Magazines of the 1920s funded by the FWF examines illustrated entertainment magazines of the 1920s and early 1930s in their ability to form new aesthetical styles, to give its readers social orientation, to constitute new in-groups; it researches how they establish new types of writers and how they supplement traditional educational knowledge with consumer knowledge. In the context of a virulent magazine discourse advertisements, advice texts, images and literary texts not only meet in confined space, but also relate formally and functionally to each other. Literary texts not only show an intermedia form, but they also integrate consumer culture/goods aesthetics; magazine novels, sequel novels and poems archive aspects of consumer culture. Conversely, advertisements and advice texts address readers. With dazzling promises of consumption and incentives to shape one`s own life according to the pictorial and literary offerings, these magazines blur the line between fact and fiction; effective advices are made to readers to aestheticize their own life. Everyday life finds its way into art via magazines and changes its form, but the aesthetically charged life is replayed back into (consumption) everyday life, which can be understood as the prefiguration of a pop culture avant la lettre.