American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Marilyn Monroe lives in Medias res..." (more)
Key Phrases: cartographic mode, iconographic mode, renegade body, Marilyn Monroe, New York, Los Angeles (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Baty's postmodern rendering of Monroe's ghostly presence in American culture suggests the ways that not only beauty but individuals themselves are commodified as they circulate through the mass media. . . . Baty evocatively analyzes the different modes by which the mass media remembers figures like Monroe."--"In These Times

Product Description

Marilyn Monroe is alive and well in the American imagination. She is the stuff of memory, living as icon, mysterious suicide, transgressive goddess--a character that tells the story of America itself. American Monroe explores the ways we remember Marilyn--from playing cards, books, and fan clubs, to female impersonators, political conspiracies, and high art, her ubiquitous presence informs our cultural common ground.
Finding in Marilyn a "representative character" of our time, Baty explores some of the cultural lives she has been made to lead. We follow "the mediatrix" from the biographies by Mailer and Steinem, to the shadowy Kennedy connection, to the coroner Noguchi's obsession with the body of the dead star. Representations of Marilyn, Baty shows, displace neat categories of high and low culture, of public and private, male and female. She becomes a surface that mirrors everything it touches, a site upon which to explore the character of the postmodern condition.
American Monroe is an innovative, scintillating look at the making and remaking of popular icons. It explores the vocabulary of memory as it moves the reader past vistas of American political culture. It seeks to understand Marilyn's enduring power and how, through our many-layered rememberings of her, we come to understand ourselves and our shared history.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 197 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (August 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520088069
• ISBN-13: 978-0520088061
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #887,893 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Novel Approach to Monroe, May 28, 2000

By A Customer

S. Paige Baty's American Monroe is one of the most riveting academic books on popular culture I have ever read. The author does an excellent job of explaining how the star has functioned as an icon of popular memory over the past three and a half decades, exploring her image from cultural, historical, and political angles.

She explains that the "real" story began once Monroe died, in so much as her corpse provided the ground for recent history (Hollywood, Presidential politics, feminism) to be written. If you're looking for an ordinary biography of Marilyn, or a typical rendering of her place in history, don't look here. But if you'd like to gain a critical or philosophical perspective on the star, buy this book! Now!

Of particular interest is Baty's take on mass media, virtual communities bound by the internet, and a re-thinking of the way American citizens cast our vote in the democratic process.