The Detective of Modernity

Georgia Giannakopoulou is Associate Lecturer in Sociology and the International Honors Program at ACG-Deree, The American College of Greece and an Affiliate Researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Glasgow, UK. Graeme Gilloch is Professor in Sociology at Lancaster University and the author of Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations; Siegfried Kracauer, Our Companion in Misfortune; and Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City.

Introduction; Part 1: Modernity, Metropolis and Method; 1. Critical Sociology: The Methodological Controversy; 2. Siegfried Kracauer’s Metaphysics of the Passage and Methodology of Social Science; 3. The Metropolis and Emotional Life: Experience, Rifts and Knowledge; 4. The Social Experience of Urban Life: The Aesthetical Interpretation of Places and Ambiances; Part 2: Fragments and Faces; 5. The Street and the Fragment Aesthetics of Experience; Aesthetics of the Particular in David Frisby; 6. Cinematic ‘Fragments of Modernity’: Film and Society Revisited; 7. On the Face of Things. Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer on Physiognomy and Film; Part 3: Cityscapes; 8. Fragments of Cityscapes; 9. Urban Aestheticization Processes: Cityscape, Landscape and Image; 10. Architecture and Fashion in fin-de-siécle Vienna; Part 4: Haunts; 11. Flâneurs, Detectives and Architects; 12. Cotton and Other Threads; 13. In Search of Lost Streets; Part 5: Figures; 14. 'Hamlet wird Detektiv': Reflections on Benjamin, Kracauer and (Neo-)Noir; 15. The Collector's Touch: The Task of the Cultural Critic in the Age of Digital Media; 16. Unmasking the Flâneur