pt. 1. The vanishing other: mass culture The hidden dialectic: avantgarde -technology -mass culture -- Adorno in reverse: from Hollywood to Richard Wagner -- Mass culture as woman: modernism's other -- pt. 2. Texts and contexts The vamp and the machine: Fritz Lang's Metropolis -- Producing revolution: Heiner Müller's Mauser as a learning play -- The politics of identification: "Holocaust" and West German drama -- Memory, myth, and the dream of reason: Peter Weiss's Die Ästhetik der Widerstands -- pt. 3. Toward the postmodern The cultural politics of pop -- The search for tradition: avantgarde and postmodernism in the 1970s -- Mapping the postmodern