Word: veblen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...perceptive." This is not hard to believe In fact, throughout the book. Kiesling seems to be trying a little too hard, to prove his intellectualism, as if he were saying. "I did so deserve to get in." He manages to intellectualize the sport as he quotes Freud, Jung, Thorsten Veblen, Werner Jaeger and Aristotle in defense of sweat...
Brooks calls this "parody display." His most obvious example is blue jeans, first mass-produced by Levi Strauss in the 19th century as cheap, durable work pants. This had nothing to do with Veblen's view of fashion as a weapon in class conflict. But when worn faded and threadbare by college students in the next century, a pah" of Levi's flashed the word that one was secure enough to dress like an underpaid ranch hand. The parody was enriched when grimy denims became the uniform of unemployed hippies, and the current irony is that designer jeans...
...Brooks pushed the denim saga one more chapter, he might have come up with Thorstein Veblen jeans, preferably worn with a vicuna sweatshirt at a Rodeo Drive block party to benefit striking grape pickers. Such scenes belong to theatrical rather than routine life, though today the distinction is often blurred. Star-struck by the endless celebrity parade, a growing number of ordinary people stage self-dramatizations in public places. But are the pseudo John Travolta, roller-discoing among the pedestrians, and the orthodontist attending the U.S. Open dressed like Bjorn Borg intentionally ironic or deadly serious...
...question is too psychologically layered to be answered by Veblen's mechanistic theories. Brooks suggests that the parodic style of showing off is purest at society's extremes. There is the avant-garde's Warholian art and minority put-ons of majority classes, like black mockery of white manners...
...manners whose term "radical chic" is used without attribution. At its best, Showing Off in America is provocative enough to get readers thinking of themselves as social beings after a decade of bestselling ego-lit. At its worst, the book succumbs to irony as an unwitting parody of Veblen's sociology. - By R.Z. Sheppard...