Synopsis
In The Language of the Heart Trysh Travis explores the rich cultural history of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and its offshoots and the larger ''recovery movement'' that has grown out of them. Moving from AA's beginnings in the mid-1930s as a men's fellowship that met in church basements to the thoroughly commercialized addiction treatment centers of today, Travis chronicles the development of recovery and examines its relationship to the broad American tradition of self-help, highlighting the roles that gender, mysticism, and print culture have played in that development. Travis draws on hitherto unexamined materials from AA's archives as well as a variety of popular recovery literatures. Her analysis traces AA's embrace of the concept of alcoholism as disease, the rise of feminist sobriety discourse and the codependence theories of the 1970s and 80s, and Oprah Winfrey's turn-of-the-millennium popularization of metaphysical healing. What unites these varied cultures of recovery, Travis argues, is their desire to offer spiritual solutions to problems of gender and power. Treating self-help seekers as individuals whose intellectual and aesthetic traditions are worth excavating, The Language of the Heart is the first book to attend to the evolution and variation found within the recovery movement and to treat recovery with the attention to detail that its complexity requires.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Trysh Travis is associate professor of women's studies at the University of Florida. She helped to found and now edits Points: the Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.
Review
A compelling and fascinating journey into the American soul as seen through Alcoholics Anonymous and the self-help movement."
--David A. Kessler, author of The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite
Travis's understanding of the recovery movement has profound implications for several established academic disciplines as well as for the incipient cross-disciplinary field of alcohol and addiction studies.--John W. Crowley, University of Alabama
Tracing the rise and diffusion of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program from subculture to pop culture, Travis provides an excellent history of the recovery movement. Destined to be a landmark in the field.--Joan D. Hedrick, Trinity College
A major reconsideration of one of modern America's most popular cultural traditions, written with intelligence and verve. Much scholarship on recovery culture derides it as apolitical self-absorption; Travis, skeptical of such polemics, discovers a dynamic and contested history of ordinary women and men navigating the complex gender and race politics of the postwar era.--David Herzberg, author of Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac
With verve and nuance, Travis offers fresh insight into the gendered subtext of recovery, one of the most broadly successful social movements of the twentieth century.--Nancy Campbell, author of Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
