Robert Pattison – författare

Robert Pattison's new book discusses Romanticism, and the cross-currents between it and popular culture, using rock music as the main example. He shows that popular culture is not merely a continuation of folk culture or a spontaneous creation of the alienated masses, but a mirror-image of main-stream cultural doctrines.

This is a striking and lively reading of John Henry Newman in light, not of his role as autobiographer and prose stylist, but of his beliefs. As Pattison writes, Newman was `an uncontaminated antagonist of everything modern', and his philosophy developed as an attempt to salvage Truth from the liberal scepticisms that had become so prevalent in his day. His greatness, argues Pattison, rests in his theory of belief and his dissent from liberalism, and in his challenge to liberal scholarship to reassess the role of belief in human affairs.

"Alas," Newman said of liberalism, "it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth." The Great Dissent examines how from his implacable opposition to liberalism Newman developed a sweeping critique of modern values only rivaled in breadth and scorn by that of Nietzsche. The Great Dissent offers a revaluation of Newman''s whole thought and establishes his place in the history of ideas as the leading English dissident from the liberalism of contemporary civilization and the foremost modern spokesman for the reality of dogmatic truth.

The Triumph of Vulgarity in a thinker''s guide to rock ''n'' roll. Rock music mirrors the tradition of nineteenth-century Romaniticsm, Robert Patison says. Whitman''s "barbaric yawp" can still be heard in the punk rock of the Ramones, and the spirit that inspired Poe''s Eureka lives on in the lyrics of Talking Heads. Rock is vulgar, Pattison notes, and vulgarity is something that high culture has long despised but rarely bothered to define. This book is the first effort since John Ruskin and Aldous Huxley to describe in depth what vulgarity is, and how, with the help of ideas inherent in Romaniticism, it has slipped the constraints imposed on it by refined culture and established its own loud arts. The book disassembles the various myths of rock: its roots in black and folk music; the primacy it accords to feeling and self; the sexual omnipotence of rock stars; the satanic predilictions of rock fans; and rock''s high-voltage image of the modern Prometheus wielding an electric guitar. Pattison treats these myths as vulgar counterparts of their originals in refined Romantic art and offers a description and justification of rock''s central place in the social and aesthetic structure of modern culture. At a time when rock lyrics have provoked parental outrage and senatorial hearings, The Triumph of Vulgarity is required reading for anyone interested in where rock comes from and how it works.