High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age and Comedy - Arts & Politics of the Everyday (Hardback)

"I find this to be an extraordinary and original piece of work...Mellencamp moves through bodies of theory and bodies of texts in popular (and so-called high) culture demonstrating, in her readings, a common range of preoccupations...She offers readings of the terrain of contemporary everyday culture (and, at times, the 'others' of everyday culture)." - Mimi White. "Operation Desert Storm", "I Love Lucy", "Anita Hill", "Twin Peaks", "Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker", "Murder", "She Wrote", "Oprah", "Geraldo", and "Phil": these and other subjects come together to form an 'anxious' mosaic in Patricia Mellencamp's "High Anxiety". Framed by a critique of the temporality of U.S. television, "High Anxiety" is a narrative journey between Freud's texts on obsession and the cult of anxiety pervading contemporary culture. Mellencamp's adventure in cultural criticism is personal, impressionistic, mimicking TV 'flow', and yet substantiates arguments with precision and flair.