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Combined Academic Publishers represents North American university presses, including MQUP, in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. This year CAP has launched Books Combined, a collaborative blog project with their member presses, developed to highlight our authors and the books that influenced their work. From the blog:
Better than anyone, we think scholars understand books’ potential, and how books, as repositories for ideas, can change us, and our perspective on the world. In bookscombined.com we’re asking scholars to write about the books that have had a significant impact on their lives – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Michael L. Ross, the author of forthcoming Designing Fictions, is the latest guest blogger on the Books Combined blog. In his post “Lies for profit: books about advertising“, Michael writes about the influence of George Orwell and the social and fictional repercussions of advertising.
Here’s a sneak peek! (click here for the full post)
The year 1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell’s novel continues to haunt our collective imagination. When I first read it years ago, soon after its first appearance, Orwell’s classic had a powerful impact on my adolescent mind. How, I naively wondered, could the whole world be governed by a system based on fantastic but ingenious lies? I’ve grown less naïve since that early time, but Orwell’s book has continued to shape my thinking.
His frightening vision of the mind-bending powers of mass media engaged most directly with malign political manipulation, but it can relate as readily to the not-so-hidden persuaders who produce the great modern avalanche of commercial advertising. The televisual gimmicks used to “sell” the Ingsoc regime’s Two Minutes’ Hate to a brainwashed audience eerily anticipate, with their inflammatory images and abrupt dissolves, the commercials for cars, detergents and the like we’re all accustomed to seeing ad nauseam on our TV screens. That’s one reason why I’d count Orwell as a governing influence on my book Designing Fictions, and especially on its treatment of the social and fictional repercussions of advertising.
Recent Books Combined posts by MQUP authors: Jan Beveridge on the book that paid a ransom
Designing Fictions: Literature Confronts Advertising
By Michael L. Ross
From Tono-Bungay to Mad Men – how fiction has treated the omnipresent influence of advertising.
Advertising, long a controlling force in industrial society, has provoked an important body of imaginative work by English language writers. Michael Ross’s Designing Fictions is the first study to investigate this symbiotic relationship on a broad scale.
The texts considered include a wide range of books by British, American, and Canadian authors, from H.G. Wells’s pioneering fictional treatment of mass marketing in Tono-Bungay (1909) to Joshua Ferris’s depiction of a faltering Chicago agency in Then We Came to the End (2007). Along the way, among other examples, Ross discusses George Orwell’s seriocomic study of the stand-off between poetry and advertising in his 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Margaret Atwood’s probing of the impact of promotion on perception in The Edible Woman (1969). The final chapter of the book considers the popular television series Mad Men, where the tension between artistic and commercial pressures is especially acute.
Written in a straightforward style for a wide audience of readers, Designing Fictions argues that the impact of advertising is universal and discussions of its significance should not be restricted to a narrow group of specialists.
To learn more about this book, or to pre-order a copy, click here.
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