Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-11T12:21:36.470Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

TV Heroes and the Denial of Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Roger B. Rollin
Get access

Extract

The Car and the TV set are icons of the polytheistic secular religion of Americans. The proof is in our behavior patterns: To be deprived of our car or our television set constitutes a near crisis in our daily life, not only in the radical restructuring of our time and our movements, but also in the marked psychological effects of such restructuring—feelings of loss, helplessness, in some cases even depression. (For purposes of comparison, consider the emotional effects of a temporary deprivation of railroad trains, for example, or live theater.)

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 5 , October 1980 , pp. 457 - 466
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. Kammen, Michael, People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), pp. 273–79.Google Scholar

2. Becker, Ernest, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), pp. 131, 129.Google Scholar Further citations from this work noted in my text.

3. Trilling, Lionel, “Freud and Literature,” in The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), p. 34.Google Scholar

4. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1906–1908), ed. and trans. Strachey, James et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), IX, 40.Google Scholar

5. Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 407.Google Scholar For an extended discussion of the limitations of aesthetic evaluation of both “serious” and “popular” literature, see my essay, “Against Evaluation: The Role of the Critic of Popular Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 9 (Fall 1975), 355–65.Google Scholar

6. Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 40.Google Scholar

7. Lacey, Alan, “Ernest Becker: A Cultural Historian Who Explored the Intellectual Landscape,” Chronicle of Higher Education 13 (02 15, 1976), 40.Google Scholar

8. Rank, Otto, Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), p. 173.Google Scholar

9. Quoted in “The Need for New Myths,” Time 99 (01 17, 1972), 50.Google Scholar

10. Freud, , Complete Psychological Works, XI, 149.Google Scholar

11. Paraphrased in Becker, , Denial of Death, p. 3.Google Scholar

12. Holland, Norman N., The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 278.Google Scholar

13. Gerbner, George and Gross, Larry, “The Scary World of TV's Heavy Viewer,” Psychology Today 9 (04 1976), 41.Google Scholar

14. Rieff, Philip, “The impossible Culture: Oscar Wilde and the Charisma of the Artist,” Encounter 35 (09 1970), 41.Google Scholar

15. For a study of Constitutional violations in police romance, see Arons, Stephen and Katsh, Ethan, “How TV Cops Flout the Law,” Saturday Review, 03 19, 1971, pp. 10–18.Google Scholar

16. Holland, Norman N., Five Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), p. 125.Google Scholar

17. See Holland, Norman N., “Unity Identity Text Self,” PMLA 90 (10 1975), 818.CrossRefGoogle Scholar