Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives [Hardcover]

Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives marks 50 years of writing and cultural production on the phenomenon of camp since Susan Sontags 1964 cornerstone essay Notes on Camp. It provides cutting-edge theory and understanding on ways to read and interpret camp through a collection of essays from historical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives. It includes varied subject areas including camp icons, stylistics periods, and important and representative texts from television, film, and literature. These essays create a scholarly conversation that understands camp as not only signifier or aesthetic but also a language, mode, and style that goes beyond its initial linguistic and semiotic guise. The contributors, representing a diverse group of established and rising scholars, explore camp as a largely queer genre that includes varying modes of understanding of desire and of the self outside a hegemonic model of heteronormativity.

Bruce E. Drushel is associate professor in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University.

Brian M. Peters is tenured in the English Department at Champlain College St. Lambert.

Camp is not dead! This wonderful new volume explores its persistent effects on contemporary culture, from Dolly Parton to Madonna and from RuPauls Drag Race to House of 1000 Corpses. Drushel and Peters have assembled a collection of smart, witty, and accessible essays that explore how and why camp remains an important aspect of pop culture criticism even into the 21st century. Harry M. Benshoff, University of North Texas

More than fifty years since the publication of Sontags Notes on Camp, this eclectic collection reconsiders the mainstream proliferation of camps affective differences (and indifferences) within a broad mass cultural politics of queer feeling. Dana Heller, Old Dominion University

Contents

Introduction: Some Notes on Notes
Brian M. Peters and Bruce E. Drushel
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