The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon

Author:   W. J. T. Mitchell
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
Edition:   2nd ed.
ISBN:  

9780226532042


Pages:   336
Publication Date:   01 November 1998
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Awaiting stock   Availability explained


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The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon


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Overview

This text addresses the question of how dinosaurs moved from natural extinction to pop culture resurrection, exploring the animal's place in our lives and the source of its popular appeal. In tracing the cultural family tree of the dinosaur there is discovered a creature of striking flexibility, linked to dragons and mammoths, skyscrapers and steam engines, cowboys and Indians. Here the dinosaur becomes a cultural symbol whose plurality of meaning and often contradictory nature is emblematic of modern society itself. As a scientific entity, the dinosaur endured a near-eclipse for over a century, but as an image it is enjoying its widest circulation. The text suggests it endures because it is uniquely malleable, a figure of both innovation and obsolescence, massive power and pathetic failure - the totem animal of modernity.

Full Product Details

Author:   W. J. T. Mitchell
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
Imprint:   University of Chicago Press
Edition:   2nd ed.
Dimensions:   Width: 17.50cm , Height: 3.00cm , Length: 26.00cm
Weight:   1.060kg
ISBN:  

9780226532042


ISBN 10:   0226532046
Pages:   336
Publication Date:   01 November 1998
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Stock Indefinitely
Availability:   Awaiting stock   Availability explained

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Reviews

A cultural-historical reading of the dinosaur's image from its discovery in the 1840s to its current media superstar status as popular icon, from Mitchell (Engish and Art/Univ. of Chicago). This book was conceived as a message in a bottle, written for future intergalactic explorers to help them understand how the dinosaur figured in human civilization, treating both the real and the imaginary, the scientific and the popular dinosaur as fossils in a common archaeological dig. Though Mitchell does do justice to the theories of dinosaurs as palpable artifacts (and how their study is accorded special treatment totally out of proportion to their practical and scientific importance ), as a broadly curious humanist and student of icons, he appreciates that paleontology doesn't begin to explain the meaning of the dinosaur. He wants to know why there are more dinosaur images today than there ever were actual beasts; to decipher the dinosaur's cultural function, as a wonder and a toy and a logo; monster and metaphor and monument. He's drawn to its ambiguity: How did a synonym for failure became a surefire commercial attraction? As befits a book whose content is as jumpy and intellectually charged as bebop, and whose layout resembles a mildly tranquilized Wired magazine, great fistfuls of ideas and analyses and textual intricacies are showered upon the reader. They include a totemic exploration of Calvin and Hobbes, Lacan and Walter Benjamin and Levi-Strauss, as well as Jurassic Park, Stephen Jay Gould, Italo Calvino, the artists Robert Smithson and Alan McCollum, and a supporting cast of thousands. It is dispiriting, though, that so vibrant a meta-analysis - such provocative fun and polished wit - finds that the time when dinosaurs ruled the earth is now, and their rule is synonymous with the global dominance of American culture. (Kirkus Reviews)


Author Information

W. J. T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and editor of Critical Inquiry.

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