Shopping and Fervour

This essay considers the rise of the consumer society as articulated in sociological, cultural and literary discourses. The theories of Veblin, Sartre, Baudrillard and Lipovetsky are set alongside the observations of cultural commentators such as Barthes and Debord, and literary works are analysed in relation to themes and motifs they have in common with them. Nineteenth-century texts by Huysmans, Zola and Gide are seen to have affiliations in this regard with twentieth-century novels by Perec, Beauvoir and others. Themes treated include the predominance of the visual, the fantasmatic suppression of process in the production and consumption of commodities (and the anxieties this suppression can engender), the fetishization of newness, proliferation and the eroticization of availability. The depiction of disorders associated with consumerist mentalities opens on to considerations of existential and socio-economic debates which remain current, such as the nature of satisfaction; the relationship between choice and identity; desire and the self; and the problematic autonomy of the subject

Aesthetics · Art · Autonomy · Consumer society · Consumption (sociology · Depiction · Epistemology · Existentialism · Identity (music · Literature · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Relation (database · Sociology · Subject (documents · Cinema and Media Studies · French Literature and Criticism · Law · Literature and Culture Studies · Philosophy · Psychology