Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World(The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America)

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.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction: Understanding Consumer Culture in the Post-World War II World Chapter 1. For and Against the American Grain Chapter 2. Lost in Translation Chapter 3. Crossing Borders Chapter 4. Reluctant Fascination Chapter 5. Literary Ethnography of Working-Class Life Interlude Chapter 6. Pop Art from Britain to America Chapter 7. From Workers and Literature to Youth and Popular Culture Chapter 8. Class and Consumption Chapter 9. Sexuality and a New Sensibility Chapter 10. Learning from Consumer Culture Conclusion: The World of Pleasure and Symbolic Exchange List of Abbreviations Notes Index Acknowledgments

About the Author :
Daniel Horowitz is Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of American Studies at Smith College.

Review :
"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)