Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World

Horowitz, Daniel

ISBN 10: 0812243951 / ISBN 13: 9780812243956

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers G0812243951I4N00

Inhaltsangabe:

How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the essence of a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking. Consuming Pleasures reveals how a group of writers shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate.

Historian Daniel Horowitz traces the emergence of these new perspectives through a series of intellectual biographies. With writers and readers from the United States at the center, the story begins in Western Europe in the early 1950s and ends in the early 1970s, when American intellectuals increasingly appreciated the rich inventiveness of popular culture. Drawing on sources both familiar and newly discovered, this transnational intellectual history plays familiar works off each other in fresh ways. Among those whose work is featured are Jürgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, C. L. R. James, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hoggart, members of London's Independent Group, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Susan Sontag, Reyner Banham, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor: Daniel Horowitz is Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of American Studies at Smith College.

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and ...
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
Einband: Hardcover
Zustand: Very Good
Zustand des Schutzumschlags: No Jacket