- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (May 15 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0816638780
- ISBN-13: 978-0816638789
- Product Dimensions: 2.2 x 1.4 x 0.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 503 g
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
An intellectual tour de force that offers a highly eccentric vision of a familiar cultural landscape. -- Los Angeles Times
Explores the ‘bi-coastal logic of modernity,’ with California as one coast and Germany as the other. Startling and brilliant. -- San Francisco Bay Guardian
Explores the ‘bi-coastal logic of modernity,’ with California as one coast and Germany as the other. Startling and brilliant. -- San Francisco Bay Guardian
Book Description
Literary Theory/Cultural Studies
A cult classic that explores the concept of "California"-now back in print!
Focusing on the changing image of the West Coast through such varied social and cultural artifacts as bodybuilding, group therapy, suicide cults, milk-carton images of missing children, teenage slang, and surf music, Laurence Rickels offers a dizzying psychohistory of the twentieth century as crystallized in the symbolic configuration called California and considered in relation to German modernism, national socialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis.
"Rickels has written an important book reading psychoanalyis at the end of our century. His intent is to complete Adorno's refiguring of Mickey Mouse into his own Rickelian refiguration of Freud's project." Sander L. Gilman
"Laurence Rickels is one of the few theorists today who is able to think technology through psychoanalysis and vice versa . . . .With California as the site of this encounter, Rickels takes Freud to the beach and California to the couch, picking up, in many ways, where the Frankfurt School left off." Artforum
"Provocative (and often hilarious), The Case of California explores the 'bi-coastal logic of modernity,' with California as one coast and Germany as the other. . . . Startling and brilliant." San Francisco Bay Guardian
Laurence A. Rickels is professor of German literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Vampire Lectures (1999) and the editor of Acting Out in Groups (1999), both published by the University of Minnesota Press.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
You need to read this book...whoever you are!, Mar 28 1999
By Hethur Suval - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Case of California (Paperback)
Before I give you the back cover of this book, I have to tell you that this book is not necessarily an "easy read" despite its alliterated and enticing chapter titles. Having been a student of Laurence Rickels', I feel obligated to tell you that if you haven't read this book or any of his others (Aberrations of Mourning:Writing on German Crypts, Der unbetrauerbare Tod) you are absolutely missing out on some of the most interesting contemporary literary theory you can find!"In 'cultural clips' that fast-forward and rewind through a variety of images, disciplines,and time zones, Laurence Rickels explores 'California' as both an empirical place and a symbolic configuration. Focusing on the changing image of the West Coast to study politics, sexuality, and the effects of mass media in modern culture, The Case of California is Rickels' dizzying psychohistory of postmodernity.
In California, Rickels locates 'the intersection between technology and the unconscious' and thus reconstructs the political front of pshoanalysis which arose to combat National Socialism. California and Germany, he contends, are two coasts of an era that 'lets roll' in the Enlightenment and continues to this day. Kafka is the 'ultimate Kalifornian'. The fall of the Berlin wall and the San Francisco Earthquake appear 'symptomatically in sync'. And the invention of the California teenager - the archetypical adolescent - begins with 'a certain central European refusal of death'.
As he addresses an array of popcultural phenomena, Rickels situates the Frankfurt School of Adorno Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Marcuse within the Freudian system - and within the critical boundaries of deconstruction. Along the way he explores music and sound, mourning and the charge of sexual abuse, group and adolescent psychology, female sexuality, the convergence of religious and hysterical conversion, and the shifting status of writing and literature brought about through the rise of 'reproductive' media such as photography, film, and television."
"The Case of California is one of the most powerful attempts we have so far to establish connections between contemporary culture and certain German texts that are inseparable from modernity." - Samuel Weber, University of California, Los Angeles
1 of 7 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Mess, Sep 11 2009
By lit crit "lit crit" - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: Case Of California (Paperback)
Although there are some random clevernesses in this, I doubt they would be worth it for most folks. The author's complete surrender to pun instead of state makes this work a slough of despond.
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