Full Description
What is it actually like to live today? It's an era where world politics play out on Twitter, and where the gig economy has made the nine-to-five job an object of aspiration rather than dread. Rates of mental illness are soaring, inequality predominates everything and much of life is contained in our phones.
The core idea of this book is that we can only understand what life is like now by comparing it to previous times to see what has changed, what is genuinely new, and what is a continuation of existing trends. Providing original analyses of a range of seminal works of 90s pop culture, this book extracts a core set of concepts--such as irony, branding, and media--that defined the 90s. It demonstrates how these concepts are expressed in both those works and in the art of today. Presenting close history in a new light, this book helps us understand today by framing it in terms of yesterday.
Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
1. Generation X and Nostalgia
2. Explainer: The Economics of 1946-1974
3. Lynch and Tarantino
4. Explainer: Postmodernism
5. Seinfeld
6. Explainer: Branding
7. ______, Race, Gender and Representation
Interlude: The 90s in Ten Events
8. The Simpsons
9. Explainer: The Media and Recent American History
10. David Foster Wallace as Religious Poet
11. Explainer: Psychiatry
12. And Then ... 9/11, the Financial Crisis, the iPhone, Trump
13. Pop Culture Today
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
Index
