Book description
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.
"Consuming Pleasures offers a brilliant survey of
major transatlantic thinkers. Horowitz is an accomplished historian
who has mastered, in stunning depth and breadth, the literature on
each of his principal subjects. Lucid, elegant, and
engaging."-Howard Brick, author of Transcending Capitalism:
Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought
Daniel Horowitz is Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of American Studies
at Smith College.
