Shaken and the Stirred

Stephen Schneider is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville. He is the author of You Can't Padlock an Idea.Craig N. Owens is Professor of English at Drake University. He is the editor of Pinter Et Cetera.

"The cocktail is a thing to drink and also to talk about. The twenty essays in this collection are at the high end of the talk. The authors are distinguished in their various fields and bring historical and theoretical sophistication to their surprisingly varied takes on the subject."—Lowell Edmunds, Rutgers University, author of Martini, Straight Up"Someone walks into a bar and orders a cocktail, its purpose is to get drunk, and, perhaps, get you drunk. But how you get drunk, what cocktail you order, matters. The Shaken and the Stirred brilliantly shows, each cocktail side by side on the menu here and now gestures to other times, places, worlds, real and imaginary.  The essays here decode a cocktail menu into a cultural history of North America. This volume shows how the otherworldly charm and significance of each cocktail emanates from its mythic origins, the way each drink opposes some other drink of another place or another generation, the way drinks recall the charismatic figures who drink them, or the times and places from which they emerged. Drinks are good to think as well as drink. You drink them not simply to get drunk, but, like the eucharist, to imbibe, participate in, these other worlds."—Paul Manning, author of The Semiotics of Drinks and Drinking

• Introduction: The Shaken and the Stirred (Stephen Schneider and Craig N. Owens)Part 1: Muddled Mythologies1 "The greatest of all the contributions of the American way of life to the salvation of humanity": On the Pre-History of the American Cocktail. (Jonathan Elmer)2 The Boulevardier: Craft, Industrialism, and the Nostalgic Origin (Antonio Ceraso)3 A Continued Stream of Fire: Professor Jerry Thomas invents the "Blue Blazer" (Christoph Irmscher)4 The Sazerac: Ritual, Parody, and New Orleans Cocktails (Joseph Turner)5 My First Time (Albert W.A. Schmid)Part 2: Spirits of the Age6 "They made me feel civilized": The Martini as Modernist Culture (Michael Coyle)7 At Home with the Postwar Cocktail Party and the Cocktail Dress (Lori Hall-Araujo)8 Middlebrow Cosmopolitanism and the Post-War Cocktail in Canada (Lisa Sumner)9 Absolut Psychosis (Craig N. Owens)10 Joy Perrine and the Bourbon Cocktail's Renaissance (Susan Reigler)Part 3: Mixed Messages11 Inventing Margarita: Femininity, Fantasy, and Consumption (Marie Sarita Gaytán)12 Polynesian Paralysis: Tiki Culture and American Colonialism (Andrew Pilsch)13 The Irish Car Bomb (and One Other "Disreputable" Cocktail) (Stephen Watt)14 Bar Trek (William Biferie)15 The Taming of the Shrub (Dan Callaway)Part 4: In A Glass, Darkly16 The Lingering Louche: Absinthe, the Green Demon of Alternative Modernity (Aaron Jaffe)17 A Rye Take on the Old Fashioned (Judith Roof)18 Cocktails that aren't Cocktails for Gentlemen who aren't Men: Recovering the Metaphorical Body of the Fictional Drinker (Michael Lewis)19 The Manhattan (Edward P. Comentale)20 The Cold, Gray Dawn of the Morning After: Hangover Cures and the Inevitability of Excess (Stephen Schneider)Afterword: Confessions of a Cocktail Nerd (Sonja Kassebaum)Contributors