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Being There in the Age of Trump
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Book Presentation:
Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There (published in 1970 and adapted to film in 1979) was prescient in its vision of a simple man without discernible talent or political experience whose knowledge of the world comes almost exclusively from television. Yet his very shallowness establishes him as a TV celebrity and propels him to the pinnacle of American government. Both an incisive satire and a clarion call to resist the collectivizing force of the media that influences American life and shapes, distorts, and ultimately corrupts politics and culture, Being There offered a trenchant comment on the nature of “being” in the modern world of power. And it critiqued the tendency of Americans to seek mindless distraction rather than engagement and to find profundity in banal slogans and slick visuals. Issued a half century ago, Kosinski’s warning not to let hollow imagery trump our good sense and become our new reality is even more urgent today. The first book-length examination of Kosinski in more than a decade, Being There in the Age of Trump goes beyond conventional literary and film analysis to a larger interdisciplinary and cultural study of a work still timely and popular.
About the Author:
Barbara Tepa Lupack, formerly professor of English at St. John’s University and Wayne State College and academic dean at SUNY, has written extensively on American literature, film, and popular culture. New York State Public Scholar from 2015 to 2018 and Senior Fellow at the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (2018-2019), she is author or editor of more than twenty-five books, including Silent Serial Sensations: The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Filmmaking, published earlier this year by Cornell University Press.
Press Reviews:
Barbara Tepa Lupack has always been Jerzy Kosinski most insightful reader. Here, in her latest study, written in the clear and concise style that is the hallmark of all her work, Dr. Tepa Lupack convincingly argues that Kosinski’s Being There, though published fifty years ago, offers a primer on American politics as we know it today. This book will remain the definitive study of both the novel and Kosinski for years to come.
-- Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University
See the publisher website: Lexington Books
See Being There (1979) on IMDB ...
> From the same author:
The Othering of Women in Silent Film (2023)
Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts
Subject: Silent Cinema
Silent Serial Sensations (2020)
The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Cinema
Subject: History of Cinema
Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking (2013)
Subject: Director > Richard E. Norman
Vision/Re-Vision (1997)
Adapting Contemporary American Fiction To Film
Subject: Technique > Adaptation
Take Two (1994)
Adapting the Contemporary American Novel to Film
Dir. Barbara Tepa Lupack
Subject: Technique > Adaptation
> On a related topic:
Being There and the Evolution of a Screenplay (2022)
3 Draft Scripts with Commentary
by Aaron Hunter
Subject: One Film > Being There
Glorious Birds (2021)
A Celebratory Homage to Harold and Maude
by Heidi Greco
Subject: One Film > Harold and Maude
Hal Ashby and the Making of Harold and Maude (2016)
Subject: One Film > Harold and Maude
The Bondian Cold War (2024)
The Transnational Legacy of a Cultural Icon
Dir. Martin D. Brown, Ronald J. Granieri and Muriel Blaive
Subject: One Film > James Bond
The Lives of Others (2022)
(Das Leben Der Anderen)
by Annie Ring
Subject: One Film > The Lives of Others
The History and Politics of Star Wars (2022)
Death Stars and Democracy
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