How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal (Public Planet Books) - Hardcover

Frank, Marcie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822336022 ISBN 13: 9780822336020

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2005

Synopsis

Novelist, television personality, political candidate, and maverick social commentator, Gore Vidal is one of the most innovative, influential, and enduring American intellectuals of the past fifty years. In How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV, Marcie Frank provides a concise introduction to Vidal’s life and work as she argues that the twentieth-century shift from print to electronic media, particularly TV and film, has not only loomed large in Vidal’s thought but also structured his career. Looking at Vidal’s prolific literary output, Frank shows how he has reflected explicitly on this subject at every turn: in essays on politics, his book on Hollywood and history, his reviews and interviews, and topical excursions within the novels. At the same time, she traces how he has repeatedly crossed the line supposedly separating print and electronic culture, perhaps with more success than any other American intellectual. He has written television serials and screenplays, appeared in movies, and regularly appeared on television, most famously in heated arguments with Norman Mailer on The Dick Cavett Show and with William F. Buckley during ABC’s coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Frank highlights the connections between Vidal’s attitudes toward TV, sex, and American politics as they have informed his literary and political writings and screen appearances. She deftly situates his public persona in relation to those of Andy Warhol, Jacqueline Susann, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and others. By describing Vidal’s shrewd maneuvering between different media, Frank suggests that his career offers a model to aspiring public intellectuals and a refutation to those who argue that electronic media have eviscerated public discourse.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"While other literary-minded writers of his generation (Updike, Bellow, Baldwin, Roth) barricaded themselves in bookchat, Gore Vidal took the full plunge into the new media age. There is no comparable figure to suture the two worlds, or two epochs."—Michael Warner, author of Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life

About the Author:

Marcie Frank is Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0822336022
• ISBN 13: 9780822336020
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176