American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic |  | Author: S. Paige Baty
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 536823
Media: Paperback
Pages: 197
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 0520088069
Dewey Decimal Number: 791.43028092
EAN: 9780520088061
ASIN: 0520088069
Publication Date: August 15, 1995
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Product Description
Marilyn Monroe is alive and well in the American imagination. She is the stuff of memory, living as icon, mysterious suicide, transgressive goddess--a character that tells the story of America itself. American Monroe explores the ways we remember Marilyn--from playing cards, books, and fan clubs, to female impersonators, political conspiracies, and high art, her ubiquitous presence informs our cultural common ground.
Finding in Marilyn a "representative character" of our time, Baty explores some of the cultural lives she has been made to lead. We follow "the mediatrix" from the biographies by Mailer and Steinem, to the shadowy Kennedy connection, to the coroner Noguchi's obsession with the body of the dead star. Representations of Marilyn, Baty shows, displace neat categories of high and low culture, of public and private, male and female. She becomes a surface that mirrors everything it touches, a site upon which to explore the character of the postmodern condition.
American Monroe is an innovative, scintillating look at the making and remaking of popular icons. It explores the vocabulary of memory as it moves the reader past vistas of American political culture. It seeks to understand Marilyn's enduring power and how, through our many-layered rememberings of her, we come to understand ourselves and our shared history.
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| Customer Reviews:
A Novel Approach to Monroe May 28, 2000
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
S. Paige Baty's American Monroe is one of the most riveting academic books on popular culture I have ever read. The author does an excellent job of explaining how the star has functioned as an icon of popular memory over the past three and a half decades, exploring her image from cultural, historical, and political angles.She explains that the "real" story began once Monroe died, in so much as her corpse provided the ground for recent history (Hollywood, Presidential politics, feminism) to be written. If you're looking for an ordinary biography of Marilyn, or a typical rendering of her place in history, don't look here. But if you'd like to gain a critical or philosophical perspective on the star, buy this book! Now! Of particular interest is Baty's take on mass media, virtual communities bound by the internet, and a re-thinking of the way American citizens cast our vote in the democratic process.
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