FORTHCOMING


" 'Green They Shone' : The Poem As Environment"

D.H. Lawrence Review
50th Anniversary Issue



"J. Hillis Miller's All Souls' Day: Formalism and Historicism in Victorian and Modern Fiction Studies"

Reading Nineteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of J. Hillis Miller
Eds. Julian Wolfreys and Monika Szuba

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (UK)
New York: Oxford University Press (USA)

2017

"The Feudal Unconscious:
Capitalism and the Family Romance"

October 159 (Winter 2017)
MIT Press




Now Available

Portuguese translation of THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE (Blackwell Manifestos, 2010) now available from Tinta Negra (Rio de Janeiro, 2015)



OS MITOS DA CULTURA POP: DE DANTE A DYLAN

O renomado crítico cultural americano Perry Meisel detona as noções convencionais sobre a divisão entre “alta” e “baixa” cultura.

O autor transita pela provocante teoria de que a cultura pop experimentou ritmos dialéticos. A hábil análise que o livro apresenta de três tradições culturais duradouras – o romance norte-americano, Hollywood, e o rock inglês e americano – nos leva a um ciclo histórico da cultura pop que tem Dante como ponto de partida e revisita ícones como Wahrol, Melville, Hemingway, Twain, Eisenstein, Benjamin, Scorsese e Sinatra.



THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE: FROM DANTE TO DYLAN

The Myth of Popular Culture discusses the dialectic of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" in popular culture through an examination of literature, film, and popular music. With topics ranging from John Keats to John Ford, the book responds to Adorno's theory that popular culture is not dialectical by showing that it is.

Available as eBooks

COURSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS. Trans. Wade Baskin. Co-ed. with Haun Saussy. By Ferdinand de Saussure (Columbia University Press, 2011)

THE MYTH OF POPULAR CULTURE: FROM DANTE TO DYLAN
(
Blackwell Manifestos, 2010)

THE LITERARY FREUD (Routledge, 2007)

THE COWBOY AND THE DANDY: CROSSING OVER FROM ROMANTICISM TO ROCK AND ROLL (Oxford University Press, 1998)

FREUD: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS (Prentice-Hall, 1981)




9/11/10

Rush to Indiscretion

by Perry Meisel

I may be weary of object-lessons at gigs, but a prime bluesman like Otis Rush must get even wearier. At 45, Rush, like Albert Collins, has the usual underground reputation, and the hassled history of lame recording deals and poor management to go with it. At Tramps September 20, he also had a pick-up band from Boston with a hyperactive second guitarist who cluttered up the spaces that normally cradle his sound and let it radiate.
Seven or eight years ago, Rush had the most relaxed back-up I'd ever seen (old guy on tenor played three notes so sweet you couldn't help the tears), maybe my very first lesson in the apollonian restraint the blues requires of sidemen no less than stars. Without the minimalist discretion of those "primitives," Rush's chewy guitar (and raspy/elastic voice) would've been trivialized. Even last year at the crowded Lone Star, Rush hurdled and whispered by turns with whatever band it was, pumping silence as well as steel.
Rush's current back-ups, Sugar Ray and the Bluetones from Boston (where else?) are actually a pretty strong shuffle unit in their own (far rockier) way thanks to a rhythm section that includes the late Hound Dog Taylor's former drummer. Even guitarist Ron Horvath pulled a dazzler or two on the openers. But once Rush hit the stage, Horvath's almost constant chord wash left Otis nothing to listen against when he took his meditative pauses phrase to phrase. Least impeded on his celebrated "All Your Love," on stauncher shuffles he hopped intervals in unexpected (for him characteristic) combinations, though the superadded inflections sometimes got lost in the band's muddy dynamics. Otis: Please leave second guitarist home next time.

Originally published in The Village Voice, October 1, 1979