Within the Context of No Context [Paperback]

George W.S. Trow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 26, 1997

Written originally for a special issue of The New Yorker and reissued here with a new forward by the author, Within the Context of No Context is George W. S. Trow's brilliant exposition on the state of American culture and twentieth-century life. Published to widespread acclaim, Within the Context of No Context became an immediate classic and is, to this day, a favorite work of writers and critics alike. Both a chilling commentary on the times in which it was written and an eerie premonition of the future, Trow's work locates and traces, describes and analyzes the components of change in contemporary America -- a culture increasingly determined by the shallow worlds of consumer products, daytime television, and celebrity heroes. "This elegant little book is essential reading for anyone interested in the demise, the terminal silliness, of our culture." -- John Irving, The New York Times Book Review; "In this elegant, poignant essay, written with the grace of a master stylist, George Trow articulates the accelerated impermanence of American culture with a precision that is both flaunting and devastating." -- Rudy Wurlitrer; "Within the Context of No Context is a masterpiece of the century that belongs on a shelf next to Theodore Adorno's Minima Moralia and Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle." -- Michael Tolkin; "Within the Context of No Context may appear to be a book of the mind, for it is suffused with such a keen intelligence, but it is actually a book of the heart -- passionate, brave, and stirring." -- Sue Halpern.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Long-time New Yorker writer George W. S. Trow first published the long title essay of this book in 1981, and it now appears with a companion piece, "Collapsing Dominant." Taken together, the two essays are a trenchant and often scathing examination of American culture. As Trow surveys the landscape, he observes that television has created a land of "no context," which it then gleefully chronicles. The many examples he cites of things he has witnessed in the mass media are alarming not for what he has seen--for we have all seen this stuff--but for the intense, and at times lacerating, insight with which he views the passing parade of frivolity. Within the Context of No Context is a slim book that does much to explain modern American society, and the thoughts in its pages will resonate for a long time. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

First appearing in The New Yorker in 1978 (Trow wrote the "Talk of the Town" pieces) and published by Little, Brown in 1981, this volume dissects 20th-century American culture and how it had spiraled downward in ever-tightening circles into decay. This edition contains a new introduction by Trow.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (March 26, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871136740
• ISBN-13: 978-0871136749
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #81,438 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Apocalypse now, February 1, 2003

By 

Robert B. Rossney (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Within the Context of No Context (Paperback)

The New Yorker has turned the entirety of its magazine over to a single work four times. John Hersey's Hiroshima, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, cautionary and apocalyptic all, were three. The fourth is this book.

Within the Context of No Context went out of print almost instantly after it was published in 1980. Nobody got this book in 1980. It's a difficult read, in a voice that is diffuse, associative, and allusive, and at the same time makes direct assertions about the way things are, which few of us are comfortable reading. It's not a book that people were quite ready to read in 1980.

Except for newsmen. People who made their living by drinking out of the firehose and transforming the experience into column inches understood this book right away. (These are the same people who don't need anyone to explain the first sentence of The White Album to them.)

Trow put their unease into words. And for 15 years Within the Context of No Context existed in a kind of samizdat, a thick sheaf of photocopied pages handed from one reporter or columnist or editor to another.

You shouldn't buy this book, ideally. Someone should give you a copy of it, Xeroxed from The New Yorker, saying "Read this. This makes sense. This makes everything make sense."

22 years later, it's much easier to read and understand, to criticize and quibble with. It's no longer prophecy. Unlike the apocalypses that John Hersey and Rachel Carson and Jonathan Schell were warning us about, the one Trow outlined has already happened. We've even gotten used to it.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific, strange, beautifully acute essay on mass culture, March 26, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Within the Context of No Context (Paperback)

I was thrilled to hear that this strange, brilliant book is being reissued. It's one of those books people press on their friends saying, "You should read this -- *really.*" My own copy has long been gone, pocketed by an acquaintance whom I pressed it on in an excess of generosity. The book itself is hard to describe. It's an elegant personal meditation on (among other things) the decline of WASP society, the effects of television and celebrity on American culture, and the author's inability to wear a fedora without crushing embarrassment. If memory serves, there's also a second essay about producer Ahmet Ertegun and his assistant David Geffen -- this was long before David Geffen was *David Geffen* -- that didn't seem as good at the time but may now seem prescient. Trow's elliptical, lapidary style gives you some of the dizzying feeling you get from David Foster Wallace, though his work is a lot shorter and more terse. Terrific stuff

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars If only Trow had lived to see "Mad Men", February 23, 2010

By 

William P. Mcneill (Seattle, Washington USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Within The Context Of No Context (Hardcover)

George Trow's "Within the Context of No Context", an essay originally published in the New Yorker, is a long complaint about the vulgarization of American culture by the mass media interspersed with anecdotes from the author's past. The former is what made the essay's reputation, but it's the latter that is more revealing. Like many hell-in-a-handbasket types, Trow combines a refined sensibility with a profound solipsism, leading him to misdiagnose his personal sadness as a generalized cultural malaise.

As for the malaise, you've heard it all before. According to Trow, in recent decades (meaning the 60s and 70s, since the essay was published in 1981), a tranquil, contemplative, and authentic American cultural scene has been poisoned by a loud, crass, celebrity-worshiping, bauble-shilling rot promulgated by tabloids and television. To his credit, he manages to find a novel way to package this time-worn complaint. Much of the essay consists of brief (ranging from a few sentences to a few pages) aphoristic sections in which Trow's terse newspaper-like diction is put into the service of a weirdly compelling vagueness, a sort of lobotomized New Journalism. His metaphors skitter right up to the edge of making sense, then slink teasingly away, leaving a sympathetic audience plenty of space to read in their own desired meanings.

Of course a lot of American mass culture really is vulgar, so along the way Trow can't help but make some cogent observations. For example, he keeps returning to the idea of a gap between the "grids" of "two-hundred million" and "intimacy". Reading charitably, he seems to be making a valid observation about how strange it is that people gossip about celebrities as if they were acquaintances. Elsewhere Trow breaks out of his navel-gazing funk to interview an editor from People who describes the way that magazine tries to maximize sales by timing its cover photos to be just behind the zeitgeist. It's a fascinating bit of media anthropology, but it's also the only place where Trow steers the focus away from his own curmudgeonly obsessions. Mostly he just ambles around bemoaning things, oblivious to the fact that others have advanced the same complaints under the heading of "alienation" or weltschmerz years before anyone even dreamed of television.

This book contains another essay, "Collapsing Dominant", written fifteen years later as a kind of follow-up. Though essentially the same stuff (the world is still going to hell, though Trow is surprisingly fond of Quentin Tarantino), this one feels more honest because it is openly autobiographical. Trow talks at length about his family, a New York publishing dynasty, and his distress at watching the eastern WASP establishment culture they represented fall out of favor in the 1960s just as he was becoming an adult. The free-floating anguish of the earlier essay now shows itself as originating in Trow's sense of being denied his birthright. This is hopeless snobbery, of course, but Trow comes off better here for being forthright about his frustrated sense of entitlement, and spells out more of the personal details that lie at the heart of his angst. Perhaps most revealing is an aside about his time at Exeter in the late 1950s, when he belonged to a clique who called themselves "negos", because they had a negative attitude towards the world that sprung from the deep well of disaffection known only to the most bright, sensitive, and privileged young men. Could this be the secret of Trow's enduring appeal: that he speaks to the clever adolescents his readers once were?