Research Catalog

Title

Seducing America : how television charms the modern voter / Roderick P. Hart.

Author

Hart, Roderick P.

Publication

Thousand Oaks : Sage Publications, [1999], ©1999.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 209 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• Seducing America is a psychological investigation of how television has changed American politics. The author's central claim - that television makes us feel good about feeling bad about politics - is buttressed by a wide-ranging analysis of political television. Roderick P. Hart argues that television has traded political wisdom for five lesser emotions - feelings of intimacy, discernment, cleverness, activity, and importance.
• These feelings have become television's distinctive currency, postmodern tokens for a manifestly uncertain world. Hart explores the considerable costs of this legacy for governance and urges that it be supplanted by a New Puritanism, a set of community-based attitudes badly needed in the nation at present.
• New pedagogy combined with Hart's rigorous blend of rhetorical and social scientific research and eloquent and passionate writing make this book a superb supplementary text for political communication and media studies courses.

Subject

• Television in politics > United States

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-193) and index.

Contents

1. Political Feelings -- 2. Feeling Intimate: The Rise of Personality Politics -- 3. Feeling Informed: The Effects of Personality Politics -- 4. Feeling Clever: The Cold Comforts of Postmodernism -- 5. Feeling Busy: The Frenzy of Establishment Politics -- 6. Feeling Important: The Temptations of Alternative Politics -- 7. Residual Feelings.

ISBN

• 0761916237 (cloth : acid-free paper)
• 0761916245 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

LCCN

98025381

OCLC

ocm39384624

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries