High Culture: Reflections on Addiction and Modernity (Suny Series in Postmodern Culture) [Paperback]

Anna Alexander (Editor), Mark S. Roberts (Series Editor)

Book Description

Series: Suny Series in Postmodern Culture | Publication Date: December 5, 2002

Addresses the place of addiction in modern art, literature, philosophy, and psychology, including its effects on the works of such thinkers and writers as Heidegger, Nietzsche, DeQuincey, Breton, and Burroughs.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

This is the first comprehensive text to address addiction and its multiple effects on and extensions into art, literature, philosophy, and psychology. Most research into addiction has taken place within the disciplines of medicine, criminology, politics, and social psychology. When seen from a broad cultural perspective, however, addiction emerges directly alongside modernity, haunting its various discourses of digression, dissent, and the transcendence of the commonplace. Who could even imagine modern writing without the addictive, visionary excesses of writers like Baudelaire, DeQuincey, Poe, Burroughs, or Artaud? Or, for that matter, modern culture without its "outsiders," its incorrigible addicts, its defaced subjects: smokers, users, overeaters, alcoholics, the insane? Taking a cultural studies approach to addiction, High Culture offers a readable and accessible collection of essays on these socially marginalized practices and discourses so central to modernity.

About the Author

Anna Alexander is Professor at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University in Montreal. Mark S. Roberts teaches in the Department of Philosophy at State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Product Details

• Paperback: 418 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press (December 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791455548
• ISBN-13: 978-0791455548
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,255,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Rewards Close Reading, April 12, 2009

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Dr. Michael A. Rinella (Albany, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: High Culture: Reflections on Addiction and Modernity (Suny Series in Postmodern Culture) (Paperback)

This is not an easy book, but if you read the essays closely, they are challenging and rewarding. Derrida and Allison's essays are especially good.