Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America - Couverture rigide

Hughes, Robert

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0195076761 ISBN 13 : 9780195076769

Editeur : Oxford University Press Inc, 1993

Synopsis

Physical description; xiii, 210 p. ; 22 cm. Subjects; Arts and society - United States - History - 20th century. Popular culture - United States.

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

'splendid diatribe ... The reader may sometimes flinch under the barrage of furious one-liners, but nobody could begrudge Hughes the pleasure he must have had in constructing them. Nothing ought to be compulsory reading, but I'd like to think that The Culture of Complaint might accidentally fall into the hands of a few schoolteachers on both sides of the Atlantic.' Times Literary Supplement

'a curious mixture of gritty truth and liberal piety ... On the attack he can be sensible as well as amusing.' Roger Kimball, Sunday Telegraph

'what sets this book apart is the fact that Hughes argues that the right is also guilty of supreme lack of connectedness to reality' Kevin Young, Living Marxism, August 1993

'Political correctness is out to clean up our speech and behaviour. This short book, by an Australian-born art critic who still values America as a Utopian site of experiment and pluralism, lucidly diagnoses where pc has come from and where it will take us if we don't watch out.' The Independent on Sunday

'his local insights are persistently invigorating ... Reading him, you are constantly aware of a mind cutting through sham and cant, doing marvellously trenchant things with language.' John Carey, Sunday Times

'infused with a generous and humorous spirit, of the sort that is indispensable to any authentic manifestation of outrage or impatience ... The immense value of his book is that it wants to uphold pluralism and experiment without compromising or qualifying the thing that makes these things at once possible and worthwhile - namely free inquiry and uninhibited debate.' Christopher Hitchens, Independent on Sunday

'Like all of Hughes's work it possesses not only wit, common sense and learning, but more than its fair share of intellectual courage. His criticism and his histories are so fresh and original in part because he is so shockingly different to what he is meant to think and say.' Michael Lewis, Literary Review

'It is frequently delightful, often very funny, and splendidly abrasive. It is also quite important ... He is also an excellent historian of the deep American roots of a therapeutic aesthetic ideal.' Fredric Paul Smoler, The Observer

'provocative and often amusing book ... throughout his book, Hughes maintains a good sense of humour about the absurd factionalism that has overtaken so much of American political and cultural life.' Michael Sheldon, Daily Telegraph

'it is as spirited and jolly a book as one is likely to find, even as it catalogues a host of grim trends that have overtaken US culture ... an agile and mellifluous quodlibetarian and damned funny too' Jim Holt, The European

Présentation de l'éditeur :

In this radical account of the decline of twentieth-century American culture, Time art critic Robert Hughes insists that the politicization of almost every area of American culture has resulted in quarrelling, infighting, and a fall in the standards needed to hold such a diverse nation together. Based on a series of lectures sponsored by the New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, Culture of Complaint asserts that the melting pot of America has never melted, and that American mutuality has always existed in a recognition of differences. The blame for the fraying of the American sense of collectivity and mutual respect is laid at many doors: demagogues who claim there is only one path to virtuous Americanness, multiculturalists who seek to rewrite history, advocators of political correctness, and sociologists who see the dysfunctional family as the cause of most personal problems. The book is an extraordinary statement of the times, and a clarion call for the rebuilding of America.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Oxford University Press Inc
• Date d'édition: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0195076761
• ISBN 13: 9780195076769
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 224