Elvis After Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend [Paperback]

Gilbert B. Rodman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 9, 1996

'For a dead man, Elvis Presley is awfully noisy. His body may have failed him in 1977, but today his spirit, his image, and his myths do more than live on: they flourish, they thrive, they multiply.'
Why is Elvis Presley so ubiquitous a presence in US culture? Why does he continue to enjoy a cultural prominence that would be the envy of the most heavily publicized living celebrities?
In Elvis after Elvis Gil Rodman traces the myriad manifestations of The King in popular and not-so-popular culture. He asks why Elvis continues to defy our expectations of how dead stars are supposed to behave: Elvis not only refuses to go away, he keeps showing up in places where he seemingly doesn't belong.
Rodman draws upon an extensive and eclectic body of Elvis 'sightings', from Elvis's appearances at the heart of the 1992 Presidential campaign to the debate over his worthiness as a subject for a postage stamp, and from Elvis's central role in furious debates about racism and the appropriation of African-American music to the world of Elvis impersonators and the importance of Graceland as a place of pilgrimage for Elvis fans and followers.
Rodman shows how Elvis has become inseparable from many of the defining myths of US culture, enmeshed with the American dream and the very idea of the 'United States', caught up in debates about race, gender and sexuality and in the wars over what constitutes a national culture.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Elvis is not about music. Nor is Elvis simply about fame. Nor can we explain what makes Elvis special by the avidity of his fans, the charm of his films, his devilish good looks, or his gyrating hips. None of this is sufficient to exhaust the richness that is the phenomenon of Elvis 20 years after his death. Gilbert Rodman looks at the posthumous career of this redneck holy man in order to shed light on the myths by which American culture survives. This is not your typical fan book, but neither is it a dry academic exercise. Rather, it is a twisting, unpredictable analysis and narrative that shows how an American religion came to find its prophet in a slick-haired country boy from Tupelo.

From Publishers Weekly

Part of Rodman's agenda in writing this theoretical exploration of Elvis's continued popularity is to examine how American scholars define American culture. He's quite defensive about the idea that Elvis counts as culture, and this might be the reason his treatment lacks any sense of humor. He's interested in extreme reactions?the stereotyped Graceland/beehive fanbase and the stodgy pundits who dismiss Elvis as pop trivia?rather than the average person who either likes Elvis's music or enjoys the idea of Elvis as a thriving element of our culture. So rather than asking questions about why Elvis remains important (like Greil Marcus's Mystery Train) or giving examples of wacky Elvis icons, sightings, invocations and jokes since Elvis's death (like Marcus's Dead Elvis) or examining evidence that for some fans, Elvis is becoming deified (John Strausbaugh's E), Rodman, who teaches communication at the University of South Florida, uses a cultural studies framework to look at how post-mortal Elvis has been "read" by other writers. The problem is, most of the other writers have been rock critics?and they've said most of the smart stuff already. Rodman leans so heavily on Marcus that anyone who hasn't already will likely just go straight to the source. Nor is he a sociologist: he defines the entire "twentysomething" response to Elvis after showing '50s' TV footage to his passive undergraduate students. While the idea of Elvis as a "point of articulation" for our needs and concerns as a culture is compelling, the book's only new turf is claiming writing by rock critics as ammo in the cultural studies camp, and managing not to enjoy talking about Elvis.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; First Edition edition (November 9, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415110033
• ISBN-13: 978-0415110037
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,016,477 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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