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Title: America by Jean Baudrillard, Chris Turner ISBN: 0-86091-978-1 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: 01 October, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Frenchman lost in the desert.
Comment: Sure it's snobbish, and sure its condescending and overtly pretentious (Baudrillard's irony cuts both ways, because he admits this point about Europeans), but dry and dull - never. As stream of consciousness travelogue it clicks into the desert mode immediately, pure beatitude and horizonal text. Like Kerouac with brains, Baudrillard attempts to dissect American culture but ends up coming over more wide-eyed and niave than the Dhama bum could ever acchieve. The only real concrete attempt at discussing America comes in the final chapter where Baudrillard turns towards the simulated power-state the nation has become, and as always the ideas are beyond reproach. Despite it's alientated ignorance and innocence (Baudrillard confused in 'utopia-acchieved') this is a ravishing and colourful text that has few peers in modern cultural deconstruction.
Rating: 4
Summary: French impressionists insightful reflections of America
Comment: Here you can read a modern French philosopher's impressions of America. The author writes poetically and impressionistically about his visits to California and New York and points in between. He is simultaneously impressed, charmed, confounded, curious, and intrigued by this big country and its people, in contrast to Europe and Europeans. This is not so much a travelogue, but rather a gentle and thoughtful dissection of American culture, done in drive-by fashion, taking in the architecture, billboards, men and women on the sidewalks, the corner stop-and-shops, the geography, the highways, deserts, even the skies. This is not a book putting down America, as one might eroneously assume, but neither is it a pat-on-the-back. For American readers, it will serve as a mirror that reflects striking realities, both flattering and not, that, nevertheless, have become so common to us Americans that they are practically invisible to us, if not for the insightful light shined by this urbane French writer. Think of this book as a French impressionistic painting of America,--more in the "people-caught-in-the-act" style of Manet, rather than Monet with his lillies and haystacks--where the mundane, the ugly, the beautiful and the grandiose blend into a composition of insight, harmony and even-handed judgement of the particulars.
Rating: 1
Summary: garden variety platitude
Comment: Looking for an interesting critique of America? Look elsewhere. Baudrillard is your garden variety old European who likes to spill ink. The following citation from the author's "the Spirit of Terrorism" illustrates his 'thinking':
"That we have dreamed of this event [i.e. the September 11 terrorist attacks], that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, - this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact ... It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it"
Such intellectual atrocities are not uncommon in old Europe. But they are uninteresting. So if you're interested in critical intellecutal discourse about America, you're better off reading the 'Economist'.
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Title: Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, in Theory : Histories of Cultural Materialism) by Jean Baudrillard, Sheila Faria Glaser ISBN: 0472065211 Publisher: University of Michigan Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.80 |
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Title: The Illusion of the End by Jean Baudrillard, Chris Turner ISBN: 0804725012 Publisher: Stanford University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Screened Out by Jean Baudrillard, Chris Turner ISBN: 1859843859 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: September, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989 by Jennie Skerl, Robin Lydenberg ISBN: 0809315866 Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1991 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews by Jean Baudrillard, Mike Gane ISBN: 0415070384 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 26 March, 1993 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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