Author Description

The "public sphere" is widely debated in contemporary literary and cultural studies circles in the United States. The topic's significance underscores the pressing problem of the location of these contemporary debates: Is the "public sphere" a single authoritative and universal space in which the various positions in these debates compete for recognition, or does it consist of multiple local spaces spread over diverse collectivities? The term "public" has emerged with new urgency in different disciplines and contexts history, cinema and television studies, art criticism, feminist, gay and lesbian, postcolonial, and subaltern perspectives, and is proliferating in titles of books, articles, and college courses. "Public Sphere and Experience" opens the discussion of the material conditions of experience into an arena that had previously figured only as an abstract term: the media of mass and consumer culture, in particular the so-called new media.