The Shape of Things to Come

[Dave Monroe]

Marcus, Greil.  The Shape of Things to Come:
   Prophecy and the American Voice.
   New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

>From the author of Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces,
an exhilarating and provocative investigation of the
tangle of American identity

“America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance
and suspicion, crime and liberation, lynch mobs and
escapes; its greatest testaments are made of portents
and warnings, biblical allusions that lose all
certainty in the American air.” It is this story of
self-invention and nationhood that Greil Marcus
rediscovers, beginning with John Winthrop’s invocation
of America as a “city on the hill,” Lincoln’s second
inaugural address, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech
about his American dream. Listening to these prophetic
founding statements, Marcus explores America’s promise
as a New Jerusalem and the nature of its covenant:
first with God, and then with its own citizens. In the
nineteenth century, this vision of the nation’s story
was told in public as part of common discourse, to be
fought over in plain speech and flights of gorgeous
rhetoric. Since then, Marcus argues, it has become
cryptic, a story told more in art than in politics. He
traces it across the continent and through time,
hearing the tale in the disparate voices of writers,
filmmakers, performers, and actors: Philip Roth, David
Lynch, David Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sheryl Lee, and
Bill Pullman. In The Shape of Things to Come, the
future and the past merge in extraordinary and uncanny
ways, and Marcus proves once again that he is our most
imaginative and original cultural critic.

http://www.holtzbrinckpublishers.com/FSG/search/SearchBookDisplay.asp?BookKey=2267575

http://www.fsgbooks.com/searchnn.htm



 
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