Consuming ​the Romantic Utopia 0 csillagozás

Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
Eva Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia

To ​what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens? In her unique study of American love in the twentieth century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of images that define our ideas of love and romance, revealing that the experience of „true” love is deeply embedded in the experience of consumer capitalism. Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of clichés and images she calls the „Romantic Utopia.” This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage.Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that,… (tovább)

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University of California Press, California, 1997
388 oldal · puhatáblás · ISBN: 9780520205710

Enciklopédia 1


Várólistára tette 3


Népszerű idézetek

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The „moral” of the story was that men who failed to provide for the cost of dating faced the risk of being turned down by women. Although the practice of „treating” was especially widespread among the working class, these articles suggest that middle class men were facing the same expectation to entertain, only at greater expense and with a less certain promise of the woman's return of favors. Many contemporary articles suggested that men, especially those struggling to attain a comfortable income, felt both used and disadvantaged by the new economy of love, which rendered leisure commodities central to the seduction process.

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Eva Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

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The popular eighteenth-century novel by Samuel Richardson: Pamela, is an example of the bourgeois idea that virtue simultaneously brings love and upward mobility: for her moral merit, the servant Pamela is loved and eventually wed by her master. But as Jane Austen's novels illustrate, in the bourgeois ideology fortune and social status are the unintended results of love motivated by inner merit and character. Is Social status and upward mobility are seemingly accidental rewards, not conditions of love.

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Eva Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Kapcsolódó szócikkek: Samuel Richardson
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In other words, here also, two models of relationship seem to be advocated at the same time: one holding routine, labor, and calculation as the enemies of true romance, and an other prescribing regular applications of effort and skillful management as necessary conditions for a longlasting relationship.

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Eva Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

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Consider the explicit hedonism in the following ad from a 1931 issue of the Saturday Evening Post:
”Go to a motion picture . . . and let yourself go. Before you know it, you are living the story-laughing, loving, bating (sic), struggling, winning! All the adventure, all the romance, all the excitement you lack in your daily life are in--Pictures. They take you completely out of yourself into a wonderful new world…. Out of the cage of everyday existence! If only for an afternoon or an evening- escape!”

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Eva Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

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If, as Reinhart Koselleck argues, modernity is characterised by the increasing distance between reality and aspiration, postmodernity is best typified by the self-conscious creed that this distance results from imaginations overexposed to the overcodified culture of the mass media. It is not pure chance that Umberto Eco chose love to define the postmodern: "I think of the post-modern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, 'I love you madly,' because he knows that she knows (and she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. [He] loves her in an age of a lost innocence.” So In other words, the postmodern romantic condition is characterized by the ironic perception that one can only repeat what has already been said and that one can only act as an actor in an anonymous and stereotypical play.

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Eva Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

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The difficulty in choosing one narrative is accentuated by the perception that the romantic self is the result of textual determinations, „fabricated.” The romantic self perceives itself in the halo of an ironic semiotic suspicion. As Jean Baudrillard has argued, in the postmodern era, the
„masses” (as he mysteriously calls them) know their own lives are "simulations, repetitions of authorless signs empty of any real referent. Thus postmodern love brings a crucial twist to La Rochefoucauld's saying that „few people would fall in love had they not heard about it.” In the postmodern condition, many people doubted they are in love precisely because they have heard too much about it.

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Eva Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

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At this point I venture an hypothesis: an agapic conception of love is more likely to be encountered among those for whom marriage does not represent a significant asset in their social position or strategy of mobility. These individuals are the most likely to approach love as unpredictable and unaccountable whims of the heart. By contrast, the people most likely to use the rational conceptions of love promoted by popular culture are upwardly mobile and concerned about maintaining and maximizing their social status. This would explain why the middle-class and upper-middle-class respondents, women especially, among my interviewees held very detailed scripts of their partners' desirable attributes. But which attributes qualify or disqualify someone as a potential
partner, and how do they connect to social position?

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Eva Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

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Most of the thirty-five magazine articles I analysed can be categorised according to three general thematic orientations: (1) prescriptive articles giving „recipes” for attaining a successful relationship, rejuvenating romance in a marriage, obtaining a date, or imbuing a „stale” relationship with passion; (2) normative articles dealing with relationships with forbidden or unsuitable persons, such as a boss, a married man, an older man, or the ex-boyfriend of one's best friend; (3) analytical articles aimed at providing an understanding of how love starts, the difference between a good and a bad relationship, or how the „magic of love” is to be explained, based on polls and popularised sociological or psychological works. These categories go hand-in-hand with problems women face in finding a mate, identifying whether or not he is suitable, and keeping the romance in marriage alive.

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Eva Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

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To the problem of a prospective mate's suitability, the magazines offer a variety of solutions, for example, comparing checklists of his assets and defects. The romantic conception of love is explicitly replaced by more realist discussions on socioeconomic and psychological compatibility. Numerous quizzes are provided to help women evaluate compatibility and to draw the delicate boundary between „suitable” and „unsuitable” mates. For example, differences in religion or large age differences are considered acceptable, while dating married men is deemed highly problematic.

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Eva Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

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Many works of most popular filmmaker of this period, Cecil B. DeMille, for example, focused on the „do's and don't of a successful marriage”: as Lary May suggests, the message conveyed by his movies was that men expected women to be beautiful and make themselves as attractive as possible and that women not only expected marriage to be entertaining but waited for their husbands to provide the entertainment.

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Eva Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism


Hasonló könyvek címkék alapján

Rutger Bregman: Humankind
Rutger Bregman: Utopia for Realists
Doris Lessing: Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
F. A. Hayek: The Road to Serfdom
Noam Chomsky: Because We Say So
Greg Lukianoff – Jonathan Haidt: The Coddling of the American Mind
Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism
Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death
Nancy Scheper-Hughes – Philippe Bourgois (szerk.): Violence in War and Peace
Edward W. Said: Orientalism