At Stake

Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture

Cloth $55.00 ISBN: 9780226380063 Published November 2001

Paper $30.00 ISBN: 9780226380070 Published October 2003

Anyone who reads the papers or watches the evening news is all too familiar with how variations of the word monster are used to describe unthinkable acts of violence. Jeffrey Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh, and O. J. Simpson were all monsters if we are to believe the mass media. Even Bill Clinton was depicted with the term during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But why is so much energy devoted in our culture to the making of monsters? Why are Americans so transfixed by transgression? What is at stake when the exclamatory gestures of horror films pass for descriptive arguments in courtrooms, ethical speech in political commentary, or the bedrock of mainstream journalism?

In a study that is at once an analysis of popular culture, a polemic on religious and secular rhetoric, and an ethics of representation, Edward Ingebretsen searches for answers. At Stake explores the social construction of monstrousness in public discourse-tabloids, television, magazines, sermons, and popular fiction. Ingebretsen argues that the monster serves a moralizing function in our culture, demonstrating how not to be in order to enforce prevailing standards of behavior and personal conduct. The boys who shot up Columbine High School, for instance, personify teen rebellion taken perilously too far. Susan Smith, the South Carolinian who murdered her two children, embodies the hazards of maternal neglect. Andrew Cunanan, who killed Gianni Versace, among others, characterizes the menace of predatory sexuality. In a biblical sense, monsters are not unlike omens from the gods. The dreadful consequences of their actions inspire fear in our hearts, and warn us by example.

Review Quotes
Contents

“[Ingebretson argues that] the monster is an emissary of frightening wisdom. Monsters are tribunes of social collapse, announcing the breakdown of social custom and civic boundary, particularly of race, class and gender. . . . Prophets of unwelcome knowledge, monsters are convenient targets of ‘projectile contempt’ and civic reprisal. Men and women seize on monsters to exorcize their own cultural demons.”--Corey Robin, --Times Literary Supplement

“Bad people are not merely monsters. Casual vilification of such people, as Edward J. Ingebretsen argues in his outstanding study At Stake, offers temporary reassurance of one’s own civility. We sacrifice their humanity in order to strengthen the idea that we ourselves are normal, forgetting that all of us are deviations from the norm.” <Michael Joseph Gross, Boston Globe

“Ingebretsen has written a provocative work of cultural criticism, drawing on the insights of psychoanalysis, sociology, and literary studies to say something unique about public discourse. With considerable articulate skill, he demonstrates how ‘living in’ monster metaphors promotes hateful ideologies and violence. . . . <I>At Stake<I> is a model contribution to the many fields of academic augury, rhetoric, media, and cultural studies most especially.”—Joshua Gunn, <I>Argumentation and Advocacy

"Fearfully and wonderfully written, At Stake invites us to get to know our monsters, to see what they can show us about our culture and ourselves. A powerfully transformative reading experience."-- Timothy K. Beal, Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University and author of Religion and Its Monsters

“Deftly bringing the insights of psychoanalysis, theology, and literary history to readings of an astonishing range of contemporary narratives and representations, Ingebretsen poses questions of the ‘monsters’ that our culture creates and shields from intelligent scrutiny. Daring, timely, compassionate, learned, and compulsively readable, At Stake is cultural criticism for a new millennium.”—Tracy Fessenden, coeditor of The Puritan Origins of American Sex

“This is a brilliant and creative work. At Stake provides a creative lens for understanding contemporary American cultural obsessions with the monstrous. Looking at public figures as diverse as Jeffrey Dahmer, Susan Smith, Timothy McVeigh, Bill Clinton, and Matthew Shepard, Ingebretsen develops sympathetic bonds with the monstrous, often recapturing the humanity of those people demonized by the label while raising questions about our own monstrous natures. Monsters, he contends, are very human, and they reveal that we as a culture obsessed with the monstrous are really looking in a mirror at ourselves.”—Robert E. Goss, author of Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto

"A book that will instruct and delight anyone interested in thinking about the nature of Gothic."

Contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue: What the Angle Said
Introduction: Thinking about Monsters

1 Gothic Returns: Haunts and Profits
2 Drive-by Shouting
3 Redressing Andrew: Cunanan's Killing Queerness
4 Susan Smith: When Angels Fall
5 Reading the Starr: Scandal and Auguries
6 Death by Narrative
7 Sacred Monster: Matthew Shepard

Coda: Common Weal, Common Woe
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu

Culture Studies

Gender and Sexuality

History: American History

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

Political Science: Classic Political Thought

Religion: American Religions

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