Being There in the Age of Trump [Hardcover]

Jerzy KosinskisBeing 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 Thereoffered 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, Kosinskis 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 Trumpgoes beyond conventional literary and film analysis to a larger interdisciplinary and cultural study of a work still timely and popular.Barbara Tepa Lupack, formerly professor of English at St. Johns 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, includingSilent Serial Sensations: The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Filmmaking, published earlier this year by Cornell University Press.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 lC7