Once a center of transatlantic cultural exchange and the avant-garde arts, New York City has transformed into a global metropolis. This book traces a shift that took shape as cultural practices and media underwent dramatic changes: it takes us from modernist visions of urban sublimity to postmodernist cityscapes; from Hart Crane's Brooklyn Bridge to the Flushing Meadows fairgrounds; from Mina Loy's poetics to Klaus Nomi's transgressive musical performances and Jem Cohen's multimedia experiments; from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and the Magnum Photos portfolio to post-9/11 cinema and the photo blogs of the internet age. As we visit these urban spaces and dreamscapes, we enter territories that remain contested, dynamic locales in a city that keeps unfolding its transformative force.

Nostalgie boomt - als kulturelles Phanomen wie als Forschungsgegenstand. Was aber ist und wie wirkt Nostalgie? Dieses Buch zeigt auf, wie Nostalgie die Zeit anzuhalten sucht und unsere Wahrnehmung steuert. Eng verknupft mit dem Aufkommen neuer Medientechnologien und Prozessen des Konsums schaffen Nostalgie und Retro imaginierte Zeit-Raume, die Vergangenes neu erfinden und sich Zukunftigem oeffnen. Nostalgia booms - both as cultural phenomenon and as research object. Yet what is nostalgia, and how does it work? This book shows how nostalgia aims at arresting time and channels our perception. Inextricably entwined with the rise of new media technologies and processes of consumption, nostalgia and retro create imagined time-spaces which reinvent the past and face the future.