Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Culture is all around us: television, video games, Shakespeare, advertisements, books, musical recordings, news reports, even the packaging of food items. The pervasiveness of culture, however, is matched by the pervasiveness of anxiety about our position in it: Who are we? What are we? According to Marjorie Garber, one of America's most astute and imaginative social commentators, culture and anxiety are so intertwined as to be inseparable.
We are, Garber argues, what we consume culturally--even if it doesn't always agree with us. Garber's approach to culture is eclectic: she veers from Charlotte's Web to Jell-O boxes, from Sir Laurence Olivier's bisexuality to the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings. Yet her aim remains unwavering throughout. Far more interested in what a piece of culture "means" than in discussing "good" and "bad" culture, she sifts and sorts through the artifacts of everyday life attempting to find meaning and sense in the midst of chaos.
Garber's greatest source of strength as a critic, however, is her acknowledgment that "culture" is so multifaceted and meaningful that her efforts are ultimately, by intention and necessity, tentative and elusive. Full explanations would only serve to destroy culture's fun and energy. With grace and humor, Symptoms of Culture takes an insightful, invigorating look at the amazingly complicated thing we call "culture" and explains it all--well, not quite all--to us. --Michael Bronski
The New York Times Book Review, Liesl Schillinger
[I]n Symptoms of Culture she has no theme, and does not want one.... In this case, the result threatens to be an army of symptoms in search of a disease--about as good an organizing principle as a collection of musical variations without a theme. And yet, like a frustrating but fascinating hypochondriac, Garber describes her symptoms so engagingly that we don't mind the lack of diagnosis, hoping that they may in the end, as she suggests, "add up to a syndrome." Whether or not they add up to a syndrome, they do add up to, on the whole, a fine group of eclectic essays.
Symptoms of Culture
Symptoms of Culture,M. GARBER,Routledge,0415918596,1950-,20th century,Anthropology - Cultural,Civilization, Modern,History,Popular Culture,Popular Culture - General,Social Science,Sociology,Symbolism in literature
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