Consuming Pleasures

Author : Daniel Horowitz
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812206495
Total Pages : 505 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Consuming Pleasures written by Daniel Horowitz and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Jennifer Hayward
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813184479
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Consuming Pleasures written by Jennifer Hayward and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To be continued..." Whether these words fall at the end of The Empire Strikes Back or a TV commercial flirtation between coffee-loving neighbors, true fans find them impossible to resist. Ever since the 1830s, when Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers enticed a mass market for fiction, the serial has been a popular means of snaring avid audiences. In Consuming Pleasures jennifer Hayward establishes serial fiction as a distinct genre-one defined by the activities of its audience rather than by the formal qualities of the text. Ranging from installment novels, mysteries, and detective fiction of the 1800s to the television and movie series, comics, and advertisements of the twentieth century, serials are loosely linked by what may be called, after Wittgenstein, "family resemblances." These traits include intertwined subplots, diverse casts of characters, dramatic plot reversals, suspense, and such narrative devices as long-lost family members and evil twins. Hayward chooses four texts—Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Milton Caniff's comic strip Terry and the Pirates (1934-46), and the soap operas All My Children (1970-) and One Life to Live (1968-)—to represent the evolution of serial fiction as a genre, and to analyze the peculiar draw serials have upon their audiences. Although the serial has enjoyed great marketplace success, traditional literary and social critics have denounced its ties to mass culture, claiming it preys upon passive fans. But Hayward argues that active serial audiences have developed identifiable strategies of consumption, such as collaborative reading and attempts to shape the production process.

Author : John Rainford
Publisher : Fremantle Press
ISBN 13 : 1921696737
Total Pages : 403 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Consuming Pleasures written by John Rainford and published by Fremantle Press. This book was released on 2010-05-14 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the international and Australian history of both licit and illicit drug use, this investigation combines the topic of drug use with analyses of political power, the rise of the market, and social issues. It examines the way in which drug consumption is regulated in the era of global free trade by first looking at the start of the opium-growing industry and the racist origins of drug laws. Providing a social history of drug use through the lens of international politics, market forces, medicine, and race, this discussion also considers the paradox of contemporary, white Australian identity and an Australia as a nation of people whose per capita drug consumption often equals and surpasses that of most other nations.

Author : Kane Race
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822390884
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Pleasure Consuming Medicine written by Kane Race and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-17 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a summer night in 2007, the Azure Party, part of Sydney’s annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, is underway. Alongside the party outfits, drugs, lights, and DJs is a volunteer care team trained to deal with the drug-related emergencies that occasionally occur. But when police appear at the gates with drug-detecting dogs, mild panic ensues. Some patrons down all their drugs, heightening their risk of overdose. Others try their luck at the gates. After twenty-six attendees are arrested with small quantities of illicit substances, the party is shut down and the remaining partygoers disperse into the city streets. For Kane Race, the Azure Party drug search is emblematic of a broader technology of power that converges on embodiment, consumption, and pleasure in the name of health. In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, he illuminates the symbolic role that the illicit drug user fulfills for the neoliberal state. As he demonstrates, the state’s performance of moral sovereignty around substances designated “illicit” bears little relation to the actual dangers of drug consumption; in fact, it exacerbates those dangers. Race does not suggest that drug use is risk-free, good, or bad, but rather that the regulation of drugs has become a site where ideological lessons about the propriety of consumption are propounded. He argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the “excesses” of the amoral market. He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some “counterpublic health” measures that have emerged in response. These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay men’s health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.

Author : Kate Soper
Publisher : Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently written by Kate Soper and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2009 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing representations and practices of consumption in the Western world, this book offers a perspective on the themes of counter-consumerism, ecological crisis and sustainability. It is suitable for students in media, cultural, and literary studies as well as in sociology and environmental studies.

Author : Nigella Lawson
Publisher : Hachette Books
ISBN 13 : 1401396402
Total Pages : 460 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How to Eat written by Nigella Lawson and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through her wildly popular television shows, her five bestselling cookbooks, her line of kitchenware, and her frequent media appearances, Nigella Lawson has emerged as one of the food world's most seductive personalities. How to Eat is the book that started it all--Nigella's signature, all-purposed cookbook, brimming with easygoing mealtime strategies and 350 mouthwatering recipes, from a truly sublime Tarragon French Roast Chicken to a totally decadent Chocolate Raspberry Pudding Cake. Here is Nigella's total (and totally irresistible) approach to food--the book that lays bare her secrets for finding pleasure in the simple things that we cook and eat every day.

Author : Gary Paul Nabhan
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393335054
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food written by Gary Paul Nabhan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food.

Author : Brian Halweil
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393326642
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Eat Here written by Brian Halweil and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes a number of case studies in which local people began using local supply as their primary source of food, Halweil shows how consumers and producers can create short-chain food economies whether the locale is Norway, Egypt, Hawaii, Washington, Kenya, Brazil, Massachusetts, or even East Hampton.

Author : Michael Pollan
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141908513
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In Defence of Food written by Michael Pollan and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-01-31 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A must-read ... satisfying, rich ... loaded with flavour' Sunday Telegraph This book is a celebration of food. By food, Michael Pollan means real, proper, simple food - not the kind that comes in a packet, or has lists of unpronounceable ingredients, or that makes nutritional claims about how healthy it is. More like the kind of food your great-grandmother would recognize. In Defence of Food is a simple invitation to junk the science, ditch the diet and instead rediscover the joys of eating well. By following a few pieces of advice (Eat at a table - a desk doesn't count. Don't buy food where you'd buy your petrol!), you will enrich your life and your palate, and enlarge your sense of what it means to be healthy and happy. It's time to fall in love with food again. For the past twenty years, Michael Pollan has been writing about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: food, agriculture, gardens, drugs, and architecture. His most recent book, about the ethics and ecology of eating, is The Omnivore's Dilemma, named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is also the author of The Botany of Desire, A Place of My Own and Second Nature.

Author : Alan Jacobs
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780199831678
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.7X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction written by Alan Jacobs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.