To what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ...ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens? In her unique study of American love in the twentieth century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of images that define our ideas of love and romance, revealing that the experience of "true" love is deeply embedded in the experience of consumer capitalism. Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of clichés and images she calls the "Romantic Utopia." This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage.
Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliché of romance—from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses—is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all.
Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America.
Saving the modern soul Illouz, Eva; Illouz, Eva
2008., 20080203, 2008, 2008-03-04, 20080101
eBook
The language of psychology is all-pervasive in American culture--from The Sopranos to Oprah, from the abundance of self-help books to the private consulting room, and from the support group to the ...magazine advice column. Saving the Modern Soul examines the profound impact of therapeutic discourse on our lives and on our contemporary notions of identity. Eva Illouz plumbs today's particular cultural moment to understand how and why psychology has secured its place at the core of modern identity. She examines a wide range of sources to show how self-help culture has transformed contemporary emotional life and how therapy complicates individuals' lives even as it claims to dissect their emotional experiences and heal trauma.
This article has three objectives. The first calls on vigorously injecting the notion of emotion in the sociology of consumption. In particular, I show that the former has much to contribute to the ...latter, especially when consumption is conceived as inherent in the process of identity building and maintaining. In this respect, and this is the second goal of this article, I argue not only that the category of ‘emotion’ can be heuristic for a sociology of consumption, but also that the sociology of consumption has long been, albeit unknowingly, dealing with emotions. Making explicit this analytical category helps strengthen, conceptually, much of the sociology of consumption. The third purpose of this article is to offer preliminary thoughts on the ways in which consumers’ volatile desires and emotions are mediated by culture. For the category of ‘emotion’ not to be psychological or individualistic, we need to understand just how it is infused by cultural meaning through and through. The conceptual link explaining the articulation between emotion and consumption is to be found in the notion of ‘imagination’, understood as the socially situated deployment of cultural fantasies.
In the pages of the influential Harvard Business Review the former President of the American Psychological Association and prominent scholar of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, discusses the ...benefits of positive thinking. The moral lesson is clear: whatever blow fate deals us, negativity must always be converted into existential positivity. The inequities of the work sphere are nothing but tests for our resilience. Seligman manages to naturalize neo‐liberal ideology by failing to name properly downsizing, by denying the devastating psychic effects of occupational uncertainty, by making a distinction and hierarchy between the mentally and economically fit and unfit, by creating an equivalence between economic adversity and psychic opportunity, by downplaying and even delegitimizing feelings of injustice and unfairness and by calling for eternal psychic opportunism, seizing all failures as occasions for self‐improvement and for the display of emotional capital in the form of resilience (see Illouz 2008). All this amounts to creating a new way of stigmatizing those who lack in self‐sufficiency and in positive thinking. Not only is lack of self‐worth not viewed as an effect of social structure but it is viewed as self‐inflicted. More: it is in fact ultimately viewed as the cause for one’s poor economic performance. By a spectacular inversion so familiar to deeply ideological forms of thinking, the effect of social inequality becomes the cause for it.
The language of psychology is all-pervasive in American culture—from The Sopranos to Oprah, from the abundance of self-help books to the private consulting room, and from the support group to the ...magazine advice column. Saving the Modern Soul examines the profound impact of therapeutic discourse on our lives and on our contemporary notions of identity. Eva Illouz plumbs today's particular cultural moment to understand how and why psychology has secured its place at the core of modern identity. She examines a wide range of sources to show how self-help culture has transformed contemporary emotional life and how therapy complicates individuals' lives even as it claims to dissect their emotional experiences and heal trauma.
Being a stranger is the universal condition of modernity. Georg Simmel, like many of his fellow sociologists and Germans at the end of the twentieth century, was riveted by the question of what the ...new era of trains, light, cities, and money had in store for humanity; but following his anti-positivism and Weberian tendency to look for ideal types, he grasped this change through the emblematic figure of the stranger. Why was the stranger such a key figure of modernity? One reason may lie in Simmel's biography. Although both Simmel's parents had converted to Christianity, he was not able to secure a stable position at the university, largely because he was perceived by others as a Jew. He was, so to speak, forced to be a stranger. Being an outsider from within was the familiar experience of assimilated, modern Jews, a position that turned them into the observers and analysts of the structures that simultaneously accepted them and excluded them.
Oprah Winfrey is the protagonist of the story to be told here, but this book has broader intentions, begins Eva Illouz in this original examination of how and why this talk show host has become a ...pervasive symbol in American culture. Unlike studies of talk shows that decry debased cultural standards and impoverished political consciousness, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery asks us to rethink our perceptions of culture in general and popular culture in particular. At a time when crises of morality, beliefs, value systems, and personal worth dominate both public and private spheres, Oprah’s emergence as a cultural form—the Oprah persona—becomes clearer, as she successfully reiterates some of our most pressing moral questions. Drawing on nearly one hundred show transcripts; a year and a half of watching the show regularly; and analysis of magazine articles, several biographies, O Magazine, Oprah Book Club novels, self-help manuals promoted on the show, and hundreds of discussions on the Oprah Winfrey Web site, Illouz takes the Oprah industry seriously, revealing it to be a multilayered "textual structure" that initiates, stages, and performs narratives of suffering and self-improvement that resonate with a wide audience and challenge traditional models of cultural analysis. This book looks closely at Oprah’s method and her message, and in the process reconsiders popular culture and the tools we use to understand it.
To what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ...ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens? In her unique study of American love in the twentieth century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of images that define our ideas of love and romance, revealing that the experience of "true" love is deeply embedded in the experience of consumer capitalism. Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of clichés and images she calls the "Romantic Utopia." This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage. Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliché of romance--from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses--is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all. Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices
Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997. To what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens?.
Romantic love, we are told by some, is the last repository of the authenticity and the warmth that have been robbed from us by an increasingly technocratic and legalistic age. To others, it ...represents an ideology that enslaves women, a symptom of the demise of the public sphere, or a flight from social responsibility.
This book does not intend to be another voice celebrating the virtues of love or lamenting its failings. Rather, it aims to highlight the terms of this debate by examining how romantic love relates to the culture and class relationships of late capitalism. While many studies
Reason within Passion Illouz, Eva
Consuming the Romantic Utopia,
04/2023
Book Chapter
If romance is a potent idiom through which the culture of consumption addresses our desires, it does not necessarily mean that all of our romantic practices have been colonized by the market. In ...current research, there is a tendency to play media messages and consumer goods against “everyday life,” viewed as a zone of “resistance” to the hegemony or cultural domination of the former. Indeed, as the preceding chapter has shown, narratives of everyday life are opposed to “media━made” fantasies and by this token possess an aura of authenticity. Taken at face value, this could mean that relationships based in
