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Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession
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About This Book
This panoramic look at the concept of character reveals cultural shifts, unexploded fallacies, and more than a little bad behavior, rhetorical and otherwise. What does it mean to have character or to say that one has character issues? To what extent are character traits or character types fixed or mutable, innate or conditioned, essential or enacted? What about the character of a nation or a group of people? Surveying philosophical, literary, and social science perspectives as well as recent political rhetoric, the author finds that character is a bewilderingly slippery abstraction that has endured and evolved. Once an assertion of ethical substance and personal virtue, more recent usage implies that character is something to be performed, not built. Too often, it is defined by its absence, as in actions deemed out of character or when someone's character is praised despite despicable actions. The author wonders if the concept is so hollowed out by misuse that it should be retired, but in the end, she views character as a mirror reflecting the contradictions
Reviews
"'I do not propose to diagnose culture as if it were an illness of which we could be cured,' she has maintained, 'but to read culture as if it were structured like a dream' ..."
"Garber wonders if the concept is so hollowed out by misuse that it should be retired, but in the end, she views character as a mirror reflecting the contradictions that define human nature."
"Can an examination of the single word 'character' sustain a book of 383 pages and another 40-odd pages of endnotes?"
"'Is character innate, learned, taught, or instilled?"
"Garber, a Harvard professor of English and visual and environmental studies, brings a wide range of sources to her erudite, illuminating study ..."
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