The modern morality play: Subjectivity and the social production of anxiety in "Sex and the City" and "The Sopranos".

详细信息   

• 作者：Clift ; Edward Montgomery.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2004
• 导师：Hawes, Leonard
• 毕业院校：The University of Utah
• 专业：Mass Communications.;Speech Communication.;American Studies.
• ISBN：0496106228
• CBH：3150859
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：12524301
• Pages：316

文摘

This dissertation examines the cultivation of anxiety by two popular Cable TV programs, HBO's Sex and the City (SATC) and The Sopranos. It describes how their hypertextual narratives of sex and survival formulate a new "spirit" for modern capitalism. The programs reinvigorate modernism by borrowing trademark features of the medieval morality play to fashion new plateaus of social being. This striking reappearance of a premodern genre in a postmodern context is the crucible around which I have developed my study.;The texts I have selected are information resources for the state of the contemporary soul. Anxiety is the mechanism and consumption of others the reward in these unabashedly intimate texts. They articulate the dark side of a human society understood as a competitive byproduct of the moralized consumption of others. Sacrifice and seduction are recast as the prime movers of social systems no longer tied to reason or collective cooperation. Morality plays allegorize these sumptuary patterns and reframe them as a political economy of intimate energy. Anxiety is assuaged by their intensive production of unjustified knowledge or belief through a dialectics of contingency, heterosexuality, and temporal transgression. These invisible dialogues between subjects and social constructions engineer faith in a secular world.;The emergence of a full-fledged cycle of secular religious drama is a sure sign that modernism is reaching out for a new metaphysics. Updating Weber's thesis on the Protestant ethic to the present day, I conclude that the modern morality engages a definitively speculative form of modernism. It is the full bloom of what the genre established long ago as the social system's overriding concern not with history but with futures in the making. As a result, premonition replaces tradition as the primary guidebook to life. This temporal orientation suggests a unique mode of functioning in which expression has come to rule content in the cultural axiomatic. The modern morality is for these reasons an important semiotic site in which to study the current rehabilitation of modernism and its material attachments to the human spirit.