Selling Seattle: Representing Contemporary Urban America Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Selling Seattle: Representing Contemporary Urban America Book

Selling Seattle, the first book by newly minted Ph.D. James Lyons, is a British academic's take on the city's rise from provincial backwater to 1990s cultural icon. Removed in time and space from local, contemporary accounts such as Clark Humphrey's Loser and Fred Moody's I Sing the Body Electronic, it examines the transformation in terms of Seattle's natural setting and its class and racial composition in addition to the usual suspects: grunge, tech, and espresso. It should come as no surprise that, as a student of film, Lyons chooses to illustrate many of his points with references to popular movies and television series. He effectively points to The Hand That Rocks the Cradle as a depiction of suburban white anxiety and to Frasier's Café Nervosa not only as an example of the pervasiveness of the coffee culture in Seattle but as an influential reinforcement of the stereotype. A work like this written by someone without a stake in the city is overdue; Lyons may not be intimately familiar with Seattle, but such outside perspective is necessary to a fair, unbiased account. However, it should be understood that although the hardcover dust jacket spells the title as $elling $eattle, uses Starbucks' color scheme, and features iconic representations of an LP, a globe, a computer, and a steaming cup of coffee, this is definitely an academic text, not one for popular consumption. An expansion of the author's doctoral dissertation, it boasts 34 pages of footnotes, a 13-page bibliography, and plenty of terms in italics. A cultural studies paper is what prospective readers should expect--and those to whom this sounds appealing won't be disappointed. --Benjamin LukoffRead More

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  • Product Description

    Starbucks, Microsoft, Amazon.com, World Trade Organization, the grunge music of such groups as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden -- all are synonymous with Seattle, Washington, as well as ubiquitous symbols of American culture. Selling Seattle is the first book to examine the impact of this city on contemporary culture and to account for the city's rapid rise to fame and influence over the last decade. Relying on current debates in various disciplines -- from urban geography and interrogations of economic and cultural globalization to cinema and media studies -- James Lyons looks closely at the city's representation in film, television, journalism, and literature to show how it became a symbol of urban desire and fantasy in the 1990s.

    Seattle's rise to prominence can be understood within the context of the city's fluctuating fortunes throughout its history. The Yukon gold rush of 1897 made the city an economic center, yet the aftermath of World War I and America's first general strike left the city in economic stagnation. Though it was a mixed success, the World's Fair endowed Seattle with a heightened profile, including those new icons of urban legibility, the Monorail and the Space Needle. Then grunge music on the one hand and such high-profile films as Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and Disclosure (1994) on the other, while sending seemingly contradictory messages, successfully sold the city as a vibrant, trend-setting urban locale. Such an unpredictable history, coupled with widescale economic and social restructuring in America's urban centers, underscores Lyons'argument that Seattle's ascent is linked to anxieties about the fate of the contemporary American city.

    From the land of opportunity to no-man's-land to media darling and urban mecca, Seattle is at once the quintessential American city and a city like no other. Selling Seattle is an eye-opening exploration for anyone seeking to understand the contemporary American city and the powerful trends that shape the urban landscape and its place in the popular imagination.

  • 1903364965
  • 9781903364963
  • James Lyons
  • 1 June 2004
  • Wallflower Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 208
  • illustrated edition
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