States of Emergency

Patrick Brantlinger is James Rudy Professor of English (Emeritus) at Indiana University Bloomington. His books include The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (IUP, 1998); Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay; Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America; Who Killed Shakespeare? What's Happened to English since the Radical Sixties; and Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians.

• Preface I. Class Conflicts1. Cultural Studies and Class War2. "It's the Economy, Stupid!"3. Tea Party Brewhaha4. Shooters5. What's the Matter with Mexico?6. Waste and Value: Thorstein Veblen and H. G. WellsII. Postmodern Conditions7. Shopping on Red Alert: The Rhetorical Normalization of Terror8. The State of Iraq9. On the Postmodernity of Being Aboriginal—and Australian10. McLuhan, Crash Theory, and the Invasion of the Nanobots11. Army Surplus: Notes on "Exterminism"12. World Social Forum: Multitude versus Empire?NotesWorks Cited Index

Deeply researched (with full footnotes and bibliography), carefully thought out, and eloquently argued, [States of Emergency] offer[s] a refreshing relief from the babble of mainstream social and political commentary, and a source of hopeful vision against the varied voices of apocalypse.(The Ryder)