The Shape of Things to Come

[Ya Sam]

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw061228greil_marcus




>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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