This course will examine the experience of mass modernity, from 1880 to the mid 1930s, in New York City, with occasional glances to Sydney, Paris, London and Berlin. It will look at the development of and theories about mass popular culture and leisure activities, and the social and individual consequences of the new ways in which urban masses used their leisure: going shopping, going to the movies, listening to the radio and gramophone records, reading cheap magazines and paperback books. There will be a particular emphasis on silent cinema as both experience and evidence of the modern. The central theme of the course will be the emergence of a mass society and the ways in which the pleasures of commercial popular culture affected the experience of the modern - and of being modern - by those masses. In particular, it will examine how such experiences affected the meanings of modern masculinity, femininity and sexuality.

One lecture of one and a half hours; one tutorial of one hour per week. There will be additional film screenings up to two hours per week.

Lectures will be streamed.

Peiss, K., Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the Century New York, Temple University Press, 1986.

Matthews, J. J., Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity, Sydney, Currency Press, 2005.