Escape Into the Future

Cultural Pessimism and Its Religious Dimension in Contemporary American Popular Culture

Häftad, Engelska, 2007

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Escape into the Future analyzes the power of pessimism, showing links between present-day religious pessimism and the nihilism of popular culture. Stroup and Shuck rummage through an interesting and eclectic body of pop culture--from Fight Club to X-Files to the Left Behind series--pointing out the presence of pessimistic themes throughout. This volume identifies and illuminates the religious language used in these works to articulate America's need to escape from its present cultural path and, ultimately, provide hope that it might do so.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2007-10-30
Mått153 x 227 x 24 mm
Vikt490 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor333
FörlagBaylor University Press
ISBN9781932792522

Tillhör följande kategorier

Religion: allmänt inom Filosofi och religion
Kulturvetenskap inom Samhalle och politik
Kristendom inom Filosofi och religion

1. Secret Agents: Visions of Escape, Glimpses of Hope2. Do We Still Want to Believe?: The X-Files and the American Struggle with Progressive Action3. Perhaps Today: The Dialectic of Despair and Activism in Popular Evangelical Literature4. God's Unwanted: Fight Club and the Myth of ""Total Revolution""5. Relocating the American Dream: The Challenges and Ambiguities of Contemporary Cultural Pessimism6. The Quest for a Real-World Correlate Sightings of Cultural Pessimism in the Domains of Scholarship and Journalism7. 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 TitanicEpilogue-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