Reviews for Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose

The average rating for Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-07-22 00:00:00 Byron Jackson Nadel writes, with a confident and easy manner, very stylish academic prose. Which is rare these days. This book explores Cold War culture and the ways it attempts and fails to contain, well, everything: sexuality, commerce, national politics, foreign policy, domesticity, etc. The many and diverse textual examples he reigns in adhere incrementally into a full argument very much invested in post-structuralist and postmodernist investigation. Some of my favorite textual readings here are the most surprising: Disney's "Lady and the Tramp" as indicative of the closeted stated of female sexuality; a reading of the Bay of Pigs and the CIA against Catch-22; Catcher in the Rye. This work is a touchstone for cultural studies in the Cold War period.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-08-14 00:00:00 Jeff Volsky Nadel argues that the culture of postwar America can be read in terms of the Cold War notion of "containment." He analyzes a number of texts in this respect. These include films (The Ten Commandments, Rear Window, The Lady and the Tramp, Pillow Talk, What's Up Tiger Lily, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), novels (The Catcher in the Rye, Hiroshima, Catch-22, Meridian) and historical events (the Bay of Pigs incident, the Free Speech movement at Berkeley).