Bøker av Mark Edmundson

"Cancellation, scapegoating, raving on Twitter. How did the Internet, which began as a place for open thought and exchange, become a forum for cruelty and judgment? Can a whole culture become mentally ill? How do we understand and respond to this problem? Mark Edmundson views contemporary culture and discourse through Freud's concept of the super-ego, the moralistic and frequently irrational inner judge. The poet William Blake was attuned to this "dark pressure of self-condemnation," and Nietzsche knew its power as well. One way to mitigate (temporarily) the self-judgment of the super-ego is to aim it outward instead, judging and even punishing others for supposed infractions. Naturally these targets fight back, resulting in a cascade of bitterness and even hatred. Edmundson traces the destructive passion of the super-ego on politics, race, gender, class, education, and more, drawing on psychological studies, classroom experience, and the work of Adam Phillips and Slavoj }i~ek. Edmundson proposes ways to manage the super-ego and even to transform it into an affirmative power"--

Mark Edmundson finds in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself the evolution of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Breaking from the past literature he saw as "feudal"-obsessed with the noble and great-Whitman created a story of commonplace egalitarian selfhood, a story he lived as a hospital volunteer during the Civil War.

In a culture of the Self that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, we spare little thought for the great ideals--courage, contemplation, and compassion--that once gave life meaning. Here, Mark Edmundson makes an impassioned attempt to defend the value of these ancient ideals and to resurrect Soul in the modern world.

When Hitler invaded Vienna in the winter of 1938, Sigmund Freud, old and desperately ill, was among the city's 175,000 Jews dreading Nazi occupation. This book traces Hitler and Freud's oddly converging lives, then zeroes in on the last two years of Freud's life, during which he was rescued and brought to London.

In a brilliant assessment of American culture on the eve of the millennium, Mark Edmundson asks why we're determined to be haunted, courting the Gothic at every turn-and, at the same time, committed to escape through any new scheme for ready-made transcendence.