Jackson Lears – författare

The best essays from America’s premier cultural historian  Jackson Lears has been hailed as the “dean of American cultural history” and “one of the few pre-eminent historians of our time.” Well known for his elegant, daring scholarship on topics such as antimodernism, advertising, and luck, Lears has also been a critic and essayist whose public-facing writings—published in journals such as the New Republic, The Nation, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books—have explored a variety of subjects and themes, both contemporary and historical, from modern environmentalism to liberal arts education, from the plastics industry to the happiness industry, from Theodore Roosevelt to Seymour Hersh, from Van Wyck Brooks to Anne Applebaum.  The essays collected here, written over the course of over forty years, are absorbing reading for anyone interested in American history, culture, or intellectual life and provide models of an engaged critic at work on topics and figures both high and low. Offering compelling lenses on historical subjects while setting contemporary culture in rich historical perspective, the essays bridge the gap between history and social commentary and afford a sweeping view of the changing intellectual scene from 1977 to the present.

Fables of Abundance ranges from the traveling peddlers of early modern Europe to the twentieth-century American corporation, exploring the ways that advertising collaborated with other cultural institutions to produce the dominant aspirations and anxieties in the modern United States.

We are, once again, a world at war. Geopolitical elites are deploying the implacable forces of ethnocentric hatred and religious nationalism; ordinary people are paying a fearful price. Not for the first time: this has been the characteristic pattern of war for more than a century. Every selection in this anthology (except for the timeless Aeneid) casts light on modern war, observed or directly experienced. Most are grounded in particular places-Stalingrad, Halberstadt, Budapest, Baghdad, Algiers, the Tamil ghost towns of Sri Lanka, the six-by-twelve-foot cell in Belmarsh maximum security prison where Julian Assange is held without bail for the act of revealing U.S. war crimes. Some recapture the actual look and feel of war-the sight of a seven-year-old girl clutching her mother's hand, dodging explosions in the Halberstadt public square; the sound of a Mozart concerto in D Minor, heard by a family hiding in a cave, played on their own piano by a Serbian sniper. Others take aim at the vast and vapid abstractions used to justify armed conflict, down to and including the use of nuclear weapons.Raritan on War collects some of the finest writing on that troubling subject published in Raritan Quarterly between 2003 and 2022. The editors, Jackson Lears and Karen Parker Lears, have selected work that typifies Raritan's wide-ranging sensibility, focusing on a topic that is aesthetically rich, intellectually challenging, and morally disturbing. Ultimately, Raritan on War reveals the power of art and reflection to sustain humane ways of being in the world, even amid constant global violence.Contributors: C. Felix Amerasinghe; Andrew J. Bacevich; Victoria De Grazia; Tamas Dobozy; David Ferry; M. Fortuna; Cai Guo-Qiang; Emma Dodge Hanson; Jochen Hellbeck; Karl Kirchwey; Ray Klimek; Peter LaBier; Patrick Lawrence; d. mark levitt; Michael Miller; Lyle Jeremy Rubin; Elizabeth D. Samet; Sherod Santos; Robert Westbrook