EditorGlenn W Shuck is Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College.John M Stroup is Harry and Hazel Chavanne Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University.
Request Academic Copy
Please copy the ISBN for submitting review copy form
Description
1. Secret Agents: Visions of Escape, Glimpses of Hope 2. Do We Still Want to Believe?: The X-Files and the American Struggle with Progressive Action 3. Perhaps Today: The Dialectic of Despair and Activism in Popular Evangelical Literature 4. God's Unwanted: Fight Club and the Myth of ""Total Revolution"" 5. Relocating the American Dream: The Challenges and Ambiguities of Contemporary Cultural Pessimism 6. The Quest for a Real-World Correlate Sightings of Cultural Pessimism in the Domains of Scholarship and Journalism 7. The Question of Real-World Correlates to Fantasy Processes of Decline: The Deep Structure of Decay, or, Descent into the Engine Room of the RMS Titanic Epilogue-Into the Great Wide Open
From X-Files and Left Behind to Fight Club and New Age writing, Stroup and Shuck map out a trajectory of growing cultural cynicism embedded within escape fantasies. Such cultural-political pessimism might still be a minority viewpoint in America, but as a variety of real-world correlatives hint, it could also be "near-term cultural prophecy." Here is provocative and engaged reading at its best. --Robert K. Johnston, Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary The strength of the volume lies in the popular culture material that the authors cover, much of which still has resonance with undergraduate students... Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through graduate students. -- CHOICE