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The Spectacle of History - Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings (Paperback, New)
Loot Price: R766
Discovery Miles 7 660
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The Spectacle of History - Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings (Paperback, New)
Series: Post-Contemporary Interventions
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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How is history produced? How do individuals write-or rewrite-their
parts while engaged in the production of history? Michael Lynch and
David Bogen take the example of the Iran-contra hearings to explore
these questions. These hearings, held in 1987 by the Joint
House-Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran
and the Nicaragua Opposition, provided the nation with a media
spectacle and a rare chance to see a struggle over the writing of
history. There was Oliver North, prime suspect and designated
scapegoat, turning into a hero of the American Right before the
very eyes of the nation. How this transformation occurred, with the
complicity of the press and the public, becomes disturbingly clear
in The Spectacle of History. Lynch and Bogen detail the practices
through which the historical agents at the center of the hearings
composed, confirmed, used, erased, and denied the historical
record. They show how partisan skirmishes over the disclosure of
records and testimony led to a divided and irresolute outcome, an
outcome further facilitated by the "applied deconstruction"
deployed by North and his allies. The Spectacle of History immerses
the reader in a crowded field of texts, utterances, visual
displays, and media commentaries, but, more than a case study, it
develops unique insight into problems at the heart of society and
social theory-lying and credibility, the production of civic
spectacle, the relationship between testimony and history, the uses
of memory, and the interplay between speech and writing. Drawing on
themes from sociology, literary theory, and ethnomethodology and
challenging prevailing concepts held by contemporary communication
and cultural studies, Lynch and Bogen extract valuable theoretical
lessons from this specific and troubling historical episode.
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