FOCI – serie

Cool Rules introduces the reader to a new cultural category. While the authors do not claim to have discovered Cool, they believe they are the first to attempt a serious, systematic analysis of Cool’s history, psychology, and importance.The contemporary Cool attitude is barely 50 years old, but its roots are older than that. Cool Rules traces Cool’s ancient origins in European, Asian, and African cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1940s, and its pivotal position within the radical subcultures of the 1950s and ‘60s. Pountain and Robins examine various art movements, music, cinema, and literature, moving from the dandies and flâneurs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through to the expropriation of a whole cultural and psychological tradition by the media in the 1980s and ‘90s. What began as a rebellious posture adopted by minorities mutated to become mainstream itself. Cool is now primarily about consumption, as cynical advertisers have seized on it to create a constantly updated bricolage of styles and entertainments designed to affect the way people think about themselves and their society.

In contemporary society, the cult of celebrity is inescapable. Anyone can be turned into a celebrity, and anything can be made into a celebrity event. Celebrity has become a part of everyday life, a common reference point. But how have people like Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Bill Clinton or Princess Diana impressed themselves so powerfully on the public mind? Do they have unique qualities, or have their images been constructed by the media? And what of the dark side of celebrity – why is the hunger to be in the public eye so great that people are prepared to go to any lengths to achieve it, as numerous mass murderers and serial killers have done.Chris Rojek brings together celebrated figures from the arts, sports, politics and other public spheres, from O.J. Simpson and Marilyn Monroe to Hitler and David Bowie, and touches on many movements and fads, including punk, rock-and-roll and fashion. Rojek analyzes the difference between ascribed celebrity, which derives from bloodline, and achieved celebrity, which follows on from personal achievement – the difference between Princess Margaret and, say, Woody Allen. He also shows how there is no parallel in history to today’s ubiquitous ‘living’ form of celebrity, powered by newspapers, PR departments, magazines and electronic mass media.

From the pet that we live with and care for, to news items such as animal cloning, and the use of various creatures in film, television and advertising, animals are a constant presence in our lives.Animal is a timely overview of the many ways in which we live with animals, and assesses many of the paradoxes of our relationships with them: for example, why is the pet that sits by the dinner table never for eating? Examining novels such as Charlotte's Web, films such as Old Yeller and Babe, science and advertising, fashion and philosophy, Animal also evaluates the ways in which we think about animals and challenges a number of the assumptions we hold. Why is it, for example, that animals are such a constant presence in children's literature? And what does it mean to wear fake fur? Is fake fur an ethical avoidance of animal suffering, or merely a sanitized version of the unacceptable use of animals as clothing?Neither evangelical nor proselytizing, Animal invites the reader to think beyond the boundaries of a subject that has a direct effect on our day-to-day lives.

We all know what it is to dream, but we also know how difficult it is to describe or interpret dreams, or explain what they actually are. To attempt to articulate a dream is to realize how inadequate our words are to describe the experience. Dreams are beyond words, consisting of much more than what we can say about them.In Dreamtelling, Pierre Sorlin does not deal with our nocturnal visions per se, but rather with what we say regarding them. He explores the influence of dreams on our imaginations, and the various – sometimes inconsistent, always imperfect – theories people have contrived to elucidate them. Sorlin shows how our accounts are built on recurrent patterns, but are also totally and entirely individual. He examines the urge to analyze night visions and why it is that some people have become experts in dream interpretation.Many books have been published on the nature of dreams, on their psychological or biological origins and on their significance, but this book takes as its premise that all we can allege about nocturnal visions is based on dreamtelling. Sorlin shows how dreams arouse our creativity and how, in turn, our creativity influences our dream accounts. Dreamtelling is aimed at all those who not only dream, but are curious about the experience, and wonder why they feel compelled to analyze and recount their night visions.

The dream of a happy life has preoccupied thinkers since Plato, and in modern times it has become one of the signature tunes of our age – the rise of therapists, gurus, New Age cults and the use of Prozac are familiar indicators of how ubiquitous the pursuit of happiness has become within Western culture.The Happiness Paradox examines how this modern obsession has evolved. Ziyad Marar shows how the state of mind we seek remains highly elusive, and much of the energy devoted to searching for happiness is wasted or even self-defeating. The author argues that happiness is a deceptively simple idea that will always be elusive because it is based on a paradox: the conflict between feeling good while simultaneously being good. It is the conflict, for example, between the desire to break rules, for adventure or self-expression, and the need to follow them to gain the approval of society; these tensions permeate what Freud called the two central parts of a happy life: love and work.Drawing on a wide and varied range of sources – from psychology, philosophy, history, popular novels, television and films – this book will engage all those who are looking for meaning within their lives. It challenges the conventional search for happiness, while suggesting a bolder way to live with one of the central paradoxes of our time.

First Peoples argues, controversially, that far from disappearing in the face of global capitalism, indigenous cultures today are as diverse as they ever were. Rather than being absorbed into a uniform modernity, indigenous peoples are anticipating alternative futures and appropriating global resources for their own, culturally specific needs. For Sissons, however, the traditional and the modern are not mutually exclusive: indigenous cultures and nation-states are aspects of the same contemporary condition, and their apparently opposing position is an expression of the contradictory nature of modernity in the 21st century.Indigenous peoples often define themselves in terms of their struggle against oppressive exterior forces; by contrast, the metropolitan cultures they struggle against often cling precariously to the surfaces of their new land. But indigenous identities have also been forged through alliances between indigenous peoples at international forums and in other settings. The loose alliances throughout the indigenous world constitute an alternative political order to the global organization of states.For Inuit, Eskimo and Saami in the northern hemisphere, for Mayan, Maori and Aboriginal Australians in the southern, and for more than a hundred distinct peoples in between, culture has become more than a heritage: it is a project. The numerous cultural renaissances that occurred throughout the indigenous world in the second half of the 20th century were more than passing events. Their momentum has continued into the new millennium, while the challenges they pose to states and their bureaucracies have become increasingly urgent. While the economic and political issues addressed by indigenous groups were and are depressingly similar – racism, loss of land and resources, inadequate health and education services – the solutions have been characterized by enormous cultural diversity.

Flares are in. Flares are out. Flares are back again. Fads constantly cycle and recycle through popular culture, each time in a slightly new incarnation. The term ‘retro’ has become the buzz word for describing such trends, but what does it mean? Elizabeth Guffey explores here the ambiguous cultural meanings of the term and reveals why some trends just never seem to stay dead.Drawing upon a wealth of original research and entertaining anecdotal material, Guffey unearths the roots of the term retro and chronicles its evolving manifestations in culture and art throughout the last century. Whether in art, design, fashion or music, the idea of retro has often meant a re-emergence of styles and sensibilities that evoke familiar touchstones of memory from the not-so-distant past. Guffey explores how and why the past keeps coming back to haunt us in a variety of forms, from the comeback of Art Nouveau nearly fifty years after its original decline, to the infusion of Art Deco into the kitsch glamour of Pop art, to the recent popularity over 1980s vogue. She also considers how advertisers and media have employed the power of such cultural nostalgia, using recycled television jingles, familiar old slogans and famous art to sell a surprising range of products.An engrossing and wholly unprecedented study, Retro reveals how the past is embedded in the future of contemporary art and culture.

Is Britain really perceived as a nation of poorly dressed, roast-beef-eating, snaggle-toothed xenophobes? Or do the British perhaps all live in stately homes, and lead supercilious, emotionally repressed, tea-drinking lives? In Brit-Myth, well-known social and cultural commentator Chris Rojek probes these and other myths, conceptions and misconceptions of Britishness, looking not only at how Britons see themselves, but also at how the British are seen overseas.Moving easily between high and popular culture, from the myths of King Arthur and Albion to national opinion polls on ‘Great and Evil Britons’; and from Big Brother to films such as The Patriot and Austin Powers to international surveys of British national characteristics, Chris Rojek delineates the current state of Britishness in an age of multi-culturalism, multi-ethnicity and globalization.Offering an antidote to both dry scholarly meditations on British identity, and nationalist rants in favour of the British, this book opens up a way of being British that transcends racism, highlights the importance of individualism and non-conformity to the British national character, and defends the proposition that the British are distinctive among nations.Full of thought-provoking insights and engaging anecdotes, Brit-Myth will entertain both Anglophiles and Anglophobes as well as those who want to learn more about the land under the Union Jack.