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219 Bibliographical Essay GOAL OF THE INVESTIGATION. This book looks at the persistent appearance of pessimistic themes in Anglo-American popular culture in recent decades. In the course of the investigation we pose a series of questions about underlying mood in millennial America and the relation of that subterranean current to both contemporary politics and empirical conditions and expectations over the last thirty to forty years. Here we have in mind the famous post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, stretching forward through Carteresque malaise, Reaganite optimism, Bush 41 uncharacterizability , Clintonite dot-com boom, through Y2K into 9/11 and beyond into the mental universe of Bush 43. We assume that any enquiry of this kind will touch on a variety of fairly obvious religious issues, including the tension between myth and competing versions of reality and the clash between perception of well-being and progress and the perception of suffering and decline. We do not, however, suppose that all versions of American reality and all perceptions of millennial America can be shown with equal straightforwardness, therefore allowing ourselves some freedom in looking for the more distasteful realities and perceptions. Our favorite angle, moreover, is popular pessimism’s suspicion that much in technology and progress has a way of secretly making all it touches into its creatures and servants, controlled by what those creatures fail to perceive as the “alien powers” behind the scenes, omnipotent forces that really run things—including the increasingly elusive selves of the human population. In a general sense, the book has as its most remote ancestor the old study of misgivings at the heyday of the French Enlightenment by Henry Vyverberg, though far greater overt influence has been wielded by the writers mentioned in the section on pessimism immediately below. As for the mood of profound mistrust of modern institutions in its religious mode, the remote or deep ancestor of this book is Bo Giertz’s Swedish novel Stengrunden from long ago and far away (Småland in 1941). Our study’s particular theme is the outlook and mood of people who have created , marketed, and consumed a particular kind of product: items in mass culture that are (however) not targeted at the entire audience of more or less adult consumers , but at a minority audience defined by a pessimistic outlook not extremely common in an American setting. Working backward from the characteristics of key 220 Bibliographical Essay documents here, we can say: the target group thus consists of those who share a perception that different domains in culture and society are linked, that their common contemporary trajectory is downward in the sense of away from their accepted goal (this feature marking off extreme cultural pessimistic works from mere disaster and dystopian works), and who then understandably are plausible targets for creators and purveyors of books and scripts operating with such culturally pessimistic assumptions . The main evidence for reconstructing the outlook and mood of this subculture here is the mass-marketed documents most characteristic of this subculture (e.g., Fight Club). These documents are examined and read against the broad socioeconomic background of the Atlantic world, especially America, in the years from the killing of John F. Kennedy to the assumption of executive power by George W. Bush. The authors have proceeded on the assumption that America today as in the past is notoriously given to a deeply ingrained rhetoric of upbeat optimism; therefore pessimism of this kind is likely under all circumstances to constitute a minority view, and one allowed expression only within strict limits of encoding tending to preserve the superficial integrity of the sociocultural system (see the work of Arlie Hochschild). At the same time, since our questions all touch on or veer toward issues of ultimate meaning, the authors take it as likely that particularly religious issues will surface repeatedly and link the documents examined and the issues emerging: and in that expectation, they have not been disappointed. The method of the investigation is deeply affected by the resultant requirement of treating questions of genre and representative technique within documents as a means and not an end in themselves (see below). As for the organization of this bibliographic essay at finding and weaving together the main threads of source material, it follows not from superficial ticking off of a list of chapters but rather from a sounding into the deep structure which the chapters of this book obliquely reflect. Literature Giertz, Bo. The Hammer of God. Edited and translated by Clifford Ansgar Nelson...

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