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Details
Genre/Form: | Criticism, interpretation, etc |
---|---|
Document Type: | Book |
All Authors / Contributors: |
Raymond Malewitz |
ISBN: | 9780804791960 0804791961 |
OCLC Number: | 900697344 |
Description: | 227 pages |
Contents: | Misuse : from aesthetics to practice -- Theaters of rugged consumerism -- The garden in the machine : biomimetic hybrids and the tragedy of singular use -- The rugged consumer Bildungsroman -- Ritual, play, and neoliberal rugged consumerism -- The commodity at the end of the world |
Responsibility: | Raymond Malewitz |
Reviews
Publisher Synopsis
"In this significant contribution to our understanding of some of the most important American writers and cultural trends of the last four decades, Malewitz traces the transformations that have taken place in the migration from the utopian promise of the late 1960s to today's grim neoliberal realities. In the process, he illuminates the stirrings of a creative politics of consumption and misuse that may offer the most effective means for challenging this brave new world order." -- Phillip E. Wegner * University of Florida * "Raymond Malewitz's The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture is a nuanced and dynamic account of a human/object praxis and the ideological trajectory of its recent history . . . The book makes an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship dedicated to things suspended between use-value and landfill, and those working in fields where such indeterminate matter accumulates [...] will find exciting reading . . . It is a superb work of cultural criticism and a playful performance of misuse." -- Rebecca Falkoff * <i>Configurations</i> * "In The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism and Contemporary American Culture Raymond Malewitz charts the emergence and subsequent containment of the figure of the 'rugged consumer' in twentieth century American material culture . . . [The book] is a thought-provoking account of the cultural practice of misuse as it occurs in recent American fiction and a valuable imagination of the re-mythologisation of the human experience of the material world." -- David Hancock * <i>49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies</i> * "The Practice of Misuse is a lively account of how a particular praxis-a mode of encountering and manipulating the given world of objects, a mode that the author dubs 'rugged consumerism'-can interrupt a certain cultural or social status quo, providing some alternative to the scripts provided by late capitalism. It is a bold and significant book." -- Bill Brown * University of Chicago * Read more...

