At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture

by Edward Ingebretsen

Overview

Anyone who watches the evening news is all too familiar with how the word "monster" is used to describe acts of violence. In this book, Edward Ingebretsen sets out to discover what is really at stake when we turn someone into a "monster." The monster, he finds, serves a moralizing function in our culture, making exaggerated examples of particular evildoers in order to reaffirm prevailing standards of behavior and personal conduct.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226380070
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/30/2003
Series:	Supreme Court Review Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	355
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Edward J. Ingebretsen is an associate professor of English and director of American studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King and Robert Frost’s Star in a Stone Boat: A Grammar of Belief.

Table of Contents

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

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

Coda: Common Weal, Common Woe
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

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

Boston Globe - Michael Joseph Gross

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. . . . At Stake is a model contribution to the many fields of academic augury, rhetoric, media, and cultural studies most especially.

Argumentation and Advocacy - Joshua Gunn

[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

Times Literary Supplement

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

Gothic Studies - Anne Williams