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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
"Turns out it can, and does so brilliantly in Marjorie Garber's magisterial book on the word, its etymology, its altered meanings, its social ramifications."
"Garber, a Harvard professor of English and visual and environmental studies, brings a wide range of sources to her erudite, illuminating study ..."
"This panoramic look at the concept of character reveals cultural shifts, unexploded fallacies, and more than a little bad behavior, rhetorical and otherwise ..."
"The through line in [Garber's] eclectic body of work has been an interest in the proper use of literature, which exists, Garber argues, not as a tool of moral instruction but as 'a way of thinking.' To think in a literary way is to privilege the question over the answer, to embrace uncertainty and associative imagination."
"The strength of Garber's book therefore lies less in adducing a present value for the concept than in her wide-ranging account of how we arrived at the confused and confusing things it has meant and means now ..."
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