Street Noises: Studies in Parisian Pleasure, 1900-1940

Street Noises combines the diverse materials of mass culture with literary and archival sources, to produce an innovative and critical re-reading of twentieth-century Paris as the city of the people and of cultural modernity. It concentrates on popular song and opera, cultural theory and records of police surveillance (such as the unpublished archives concerning the sexual mores of sailors in Toulon), sensational weekly magazines (including the weekly Detective Magazine with its remarkable photomontage) and writers of the Academie Goncourt. The author picks out their common realisation of the experience of the city, also showing how the faits divers and the entertainment industries frame the writing of a Benjamin, a Colette or a Genet. Rifkin re-works modern critical theory through these sources, reflecting on its relation to the production of mass cultures.