United States Law - General & Miscellaneous, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights - United States, United States Constitutions - Federal & State, Civil Rights - Privacy, Censorship
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Overview
This striking study of America's battles over what we can decently say and do in public traces how and why principled debate about the character of our common world has been displaced by a new kind of public noise. Rochelle Gurstein offers a brilliant history of the arguments made for and against the forces - invasive journalism, realist fiction, and sex reform - that altered public discourse between the late nineteenth century, when they first appeared, and the 1960s, when new controversies erupted about mass culture, avant-garde art, and sexual liberation. Now the public sphere is dominated by rights talk, by puritan-baiting, and by knee-jerk liberalism or illiberalism. Is this the best we can do? Gurstein gives a detailed account of how the "party of exposure" successfully opened American public life to matters that had once been hidden away in private, and studies the unexpected consequences of that victory. And she retrieves a way of thinking, wrongly discredited as "Victorian," that could in fact move us beyond our stalemates over what should and what should not be said or done in public. Once, Americans influenced by the "party of reticence" held that if personal matters were exposed to public scrutiny they risked becoming trivial or obscene; they thought that any indiscriminate display of private matters deformed standards of taste and judgment, lowered the tone of public conversation, and polluted public space. Ms. Gurstein's penetrating analysis suggests that we must reconsider these positions, and she establishes the vital connection between our legal-cultural history and current debates about obscenity, privacy, and issues of public decency.Editorials
Roger Shattuck
Highly informative, impassioned. . . [a] strongly argued history of the struggle between public and private. -- Wall Street JournalTom Frank
A rare work of serious cultural history that manages to achieve that shiniest of academic goals, contemporary relevance. -- NewsdayPublishers Weekly -
Public discourse today, asserts Gurstein in this jeremiad, is a noisy, vulgar circus where privacy and modesty are flouted, and where so-called avant-garde artists invoke free-speech rights to justify violent, dehumanizing or pornographic works. Her rigorous study charts the death in the U.S. of a "reticent sensibility" valuing tact, discretion, good taste and politeness. Among the chief destroyers of this sensibility, she argues unpersuasively, were intrusive, sensationalistic journalists dating back to the 1830s penny press; realist novelists like Theodore Dreiser and William Dean Howells; and sex reformers such as Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett and Emma Goldman who discredited their Victorian forbears by equating reticence with prudery, evasion and hypocrisy. Gurstein, who teaches history and other subjects at Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan, covers landmark cases such as the 1933 trial exonerating James Joyce's Ulysses of obscenity charges, as well as cases that steadily eroded the right to privacy as defined by Louis Brandeis in 1890. In Gurstein's analysis, H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann, Joseph Wood Krutch and Philip Rahv reformulated aspects of the reticent creed, but mass culture won out, abetted by Olympia Press erotic publisher Maurice Girodias and Susan Sontag's defense of pornography as an art form. Gurstein brings a historical dimension to current debate over free speech and media responsibility. (Sept.)Book Details
Published
August 1, 1996
Publisher
Hill & Wang Pub
Pages
352
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780809080694