Abstract

This dissertation in Comparative Literature examines relations between modernism and mass culture in four texts from contemporary German and Spanish literature. My discussion explores ironic, harmonious, and conflictual relations between various modernisms and various forms of mass culture. Chapter one discusses such intersections on the basis of Theodor W. Adorno's essay "On Jazz." Although Adorno aims to separate modernism from mass culture in this essay, I argue that both are closely interwoven. The second chapter consists of an interpretation of Botho Strauss's Trilogie des Wiedersehens which concentrates on the role of paintings in this play, in particular photographic-realist paintings. These paintings embody tensions between modernism and mass culture which will be designated as ironic. Chapter three on the Spanish novelist Antonio Munoz Molina discusses the reconciliation of a political modernism with forms of mass culture, such as cinema and pulp fiction, as well as the reconciliation of a sacred modernism with jazz songs. A final chapter on Strauss's Das Gleichgewicht examines the violent relations between an avantgardist modernism and the female consumer of mass culture