Heroes, villains, victims, and minions are more important than ever
before in our politics and culture. In the era of television,
Twitter, and Facebook, groups and individuals constantly battle
over their reputations. One of the best ways to gain power is to
persuade others that you are competent, courageous, and benevolent,
while your opponents are none of these. Thus, character work
consists of more than simple claims of fact; societies build their
solidarity and policies out of admiration for heroes but also
outrage over villains. Recent political analysis has ignored the
great characters of the past in favor of frames, heuristics, codes,
and identities. In Public Characters, James M. Jasper, Michael P.
Young, and Elke Zuern argue that character, reputation, and images
matter in politics, and social life more generally, as they help
mobilize people and their passions. First, they focus on the
political construction of openly constructed and debated public
characters to show how we can allocate praise and blame, identify
social problems, cement identities and allegiances, develop
policies, and articulate our moral intuitions through them. The
authors demonstrate the nuances of characters and their
interactions across a range of sources-including Shakespeare, Game
of Thrones, Renaissance sculpture, modern comic books, Alexander
the Great, and Bernie Madoff-all the while showing how public
characters are used in political rhetoric. Finally, they complicate
these characters by considering their transformations: when victims
manage to become heroes and the way traditional moral characters
have evolved over time to correspond with what different cultures
admire, detest, or pity. This rich, detailed, and wide-ranging
analysis of personal images and reputation marks a timely and
crucial contribution for sociologists and political scientists
concerned with the cultural dimensions of political life.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
