Jim Collins argues that postmodernism and popular culture have together undermined the master system of "culture." By looking at a wide range of texts and forms he investigates what happens to the notion of culture once different discourses begin to envision that culture in conflicting ways, constructing often contradictory visions of it simultaneously.
Chapter 1 Cultural Fragmentation and the Rise of Discursive Ideologies; Chapter 2 Life in the Arena: Intertextuality in Decentered Cultures; Chapter 3 Speaking in Tongues: The Languages of Popular Narrative; Chapter 4 Discursive Ideologies and Popular Film; Chapter 5 Post-Modernism as Culmination: The Aesthetic Politics of Decentered Cultures;
