Skip to Main Content

I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Online ISBN:
9781452948324
Print ISBN:
9780816677733
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
Book

I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Published online:
24 August 2015
Published in print:
1 April 2012
Online ISBN:
9781452948324
Print ISBN:
9780816677733
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press

Abstract

Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self—the gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque—this book aims to make sense of the cultural dynamics of the American madhouse early in the twenty-first century. The book includes chapters on the pornographic fantasies of Star Trek fans, Facebook as Limbo of the Lost, George W. Bush’s fear of his inner queer, the theme-parking of the Holocaust, the homoerotic subtext of the Super Bowl, the hidden agendas of IQ tests, Santa’s secret kinship with Satan, the sadism of dentists, Adolf Hitler’s afterlife on YouTube, the sexual identity of 2001’s HAL, the suicide note considered as a literary genre, the surrealist poetry of robot spam, the zombie apocalypse, Lady Gaga, the Church of Euthanasia, toy guns in the dream lives of American boys, and the polymorphous perversity of Madonna’s big toe. The book casts a critical eye on the accepted order of things, boldly crossing into the intellectual no-fly zones demarcated by cultural warriors on both sides of America’s ideological divide: controversy-phobic corporate media, blinkered academic elites, and middlebrow tastemakers.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close