Bøker av Christy Wampole

"The Cambridge History of the American Essay tells the rich history of a literary genre that has been essential to the formation of an American identity. The most expansive of its kind, this volume conveys the diversity and philosophical richness of American writing from the country's origins to today"--

The essays in The Other Serious examine the signature phenomena of our moment: the way our lives contradict themselves, how exaggeration and excess seep into our collective subconscious, why gender is becoming more complicated rather than less, and how we interact with the material things that surround us. It is a book about the delicacy and bluntness of American life, about how pop culture sticks its finger deep into the ethical dilemmas of our time, and how to negotiate between the old and the new, the high and the low, the global and the local, the sacred and the profane. At the heart of these reflections lies a central question: What should you do when you don’t know what to do?Taken together, these essays comprise a guide for the overhaul of “the administrativersity” of contemporary American life, a bureaucratic prison where the brain needn’t work anymore. These pieces investigate the writer’s own way of thinking—putting forth new ideas, questioning them, and urging the reader to adopt the same spirit of critical reexamination.

Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frederic Beigbeder, Aurelien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques an emergent tendency toward "degenerative realism."

Roots are good to think with indeed most of us use them as a metaphor every day. A root can signify the hiddenness of our beginnings, or, in its bifurcating structure, the various possibilities in the life of an individual or a collective. This book looks at rootedness as a metaphor for the genealogical origins of people and their attachment to place and how this metaphor transformed so rapidly in twentieth-century Europe. Christy Wampole s case study is France, with its contradictory legacies of Enlightenment universalism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. At one time, French nationalist rhetoric portrayed the Jews as unrooted and thus unrighteous people. After the two world wars, the root metaphor figured in the new French philosophy (notably Deleuze and Guattari). And recently, Caribbean thinkers in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique have debated whether their roots were in Africa, France, the Caribbean, or in some pan-national network that could not be identified on a map. Walpole argues that while the metaphor was perhaps once useful in the establishment of communities and identities, that usefulness has expired. The longer we remain attached to the figure of rootedness, the more discord it sows. Giving up on the metaphor of rootedness, Wampole urges, allows us to see at last that we are in fact unbound by the land we inhabit."