New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture and the Class of ’58 By Sherry B. Ortner, Duke University Press, 334 PAGES, $29.95 Sometimes the announcement of a book just leaps out of a publisher’s catalog and grabs you by the throat, and such was the case with this study by Sherry Ortner, a MacArthur Prize- […]
Elaine Showalter
Elaine Showalter is the Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus. Professor of English, Emeritus at Princeton University.
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Window on Reality
“Reality” television is generally scorned as mindless, vulgar, exploitative and contrived. So is it ever sociology, is it ever real? Yes, if it’s American Idol, the FOX show that recently wrapped up its blockbuster second season. The program, for the uninitiated, pitted 12 young performers against one another for a chance at a $1 million […]
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Food: My Dinner with Derrida
In the 1960s, when my husband and I first traveled inEngland as students, we would have starved without the Chinese. From Brighton toDurham, from Bath to Norwich, the only inexpensive restaurants open at night wereserving sweet-and-sour pork. Even Indian food was exotic and scarce–and pub foodwas inedible. A decade later, living in London on our […]
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Sex Goddess
Since the beginning of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s, theorists have recognized two kinds of contemporary feminist culture: Feminism Heavy and Feminism Lite. Heavy, or high, feminism includes art exhibits, academic books, PBS, foreign films by Dutch or Belgian women directors (such as Jeanne Dielmann, Chantal Akerman’s interminable saga of a housewife’s interminable […]
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Mob Scene
Living in New Jersey is always strange, but it’s been getting stranger since HBO’s hit series The Sopranos debuted last year. Suddenly the whole state is rediscovering its Mafia roots. At my local mall, the hairdresser can’t even wait until the conditioner to tell me that he is related to one of the original five […]