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Foreign Rights: Available Now: American StudiesChic Ironic Bitterness: The Intellectual History of a Fashionable American AttitudeR. Jay Magill Rights: World Chic Ironic Bitterness is a reflection on irony and its significance in contemporary culture. R. Jay Magill Jr. confronts the claim of critics of American popular culture, typically conservative, who have maintained that its irony is responsible for the decline of civic trust in the United States. He concurs, in an eminently accessible style, that though public cynicism has been on the rise—and with good reason—the ironic, satirical attitude, seen explosively in shows such as The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, actually "preserves the individual's authenticity and sincerity necessary to engage in civic life." Irony, the author maintains, is hilariously entertaining because so fundamentally serious: it forms the unrepudiable defense-mechanism of "the modern, secular, agnostic mind." Chic Ironic Bitterness delves not only into a curious intellectual history of this ironic attitude, starting with figures as robust as Socrates and St. Augustine, but as well into the rehabilitation of irony post 9/11 in the popular mind, which the author regards as a healthy expression of American skepticism and independence—enacted even more acutely in the face of any variety of religious extremism. Magill traces the philosophical roots of the ironic attitude, interspersed with plentiful digressions on Borat, The Simpsons, South Park, Fight Club, Kenny Loggins, and a host of other pop-culture emanations, to the original spirit of Protestantism—that shared yet contentious bedrock of the American mind. By initiating a turn inward, the book claims, away from social detriments to personal integrity, this originally religious sentiment set the stage for doing so secularly and ironically, creating problems, in its wake, for civic trust. Negotiating these two paths is our current predicament. The result of these historical excursions, however, is not an academicized polemic. Rather, it is an enthusiastic, stylistically vibrant—and author-illustrated—work that offers, at last, a return-fire to those pundits and cultural critics whose self-important declarations of the "end of irony" missed the fundamental connection that irony has to the very values they were claiming to defend: sincerity, authenticity, seriousness, and trust. These attitudes are not separable from irony, the book ultimately claims, for they all have their intellectual genesis in the most basic and persistent of Western philosophical traditions: Protestantism and Romanticism, two traditions still creating identities today that we moderns did not choose and certainly cannot shed. All this makes Magill's research both timely and intriguing. His topic and perspective are unexpected and attractive, his writing accessible, sharp, and fun. Chic Ironic Bitterness promises a clever and unusual take on an identifiably American way of life that opens new perspectives on our current cultural tensions. R. Jay Magill Jr. is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in The American Prospect, The American Interest, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Policy, and Print, among other periodicals and books. A former Harvard Teaching Fellow and Executive Editor of DoubleTake, he holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Hamburg in Germany. August 2007 Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.Cynthia Barnett Rights: World Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. is the story of how one of the wettest places in American is draining itself dry. Florida's parched swamps and sprawling subdivisions set the stage for a look at water crisis throughout the American East, from water-diversion threats in the Great Lakes to tapped-out freshwater aquifers along the Atlantic seaboard. Part investigative journalism, park environmental history, Mirage shows how the eastern half of the nation—historically so wet that early settlers predicted it would never even need irrigation—has squandered so much of its abundant water that it now faces shortages and conflicts once unique to the arid West. Cynthia Barnett writes for Florida Trend magazine, where she covers investigative, environmental, public policy, and business stories. Her numerous journalism awards include three investigative-reporting prizes in the Green Eyeshades, which recognize the best journalism in 11 southeastern states. April 2007 These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America, 1865-1930Michael Tavel Clarke Rights: World The United States at the turn of the century witnessed the emergence of large-scale corporate capitalism, the beginnings of American imperialism on a global stage, record-level immigration, a rapid expansion of cities, and a passion for bigness expressed in colossal events and structures like world's fairs, amusement parks, department stores, and skyscrapers. Size began to play a key role in American identity and to alter fundamental concepts of embodiment; as a bodily characteristic and a national cultural trait, bigness came to represent a peculiar sign of American progress during this period. This book ranges broadly across U.S. culture to illustrate the Progressive era's preoccupation with large things and the range of discourses circulation around issues of size-from anthropological studies that situated pygmies and Anglo-Americans at opposite ends of the evolutionary tree, to a series of photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn taken from the summits of New York Skyscrapers, to the abundant figures of shrinking men and growing women that populated the pages of naturalistic fiction and revealed the pressures of rapid changes in gender relations. Written in accessible prose, this book will be of interest to a broad audience, from scholars in American Studies, history, English, and women's studies to general readers interested in American culture, U.S. history, the American infatuation with bigness, the social treatment of the body, and the development of ideas about race and gender. Michael Tavel Clarke is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Calgary. February 2007 |
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