Escape Attempts

The first edition of Escape Attempts provided a dramatic account of the way in which modern culture was appropriating human identity and endeavour. This new addition brings the story up to date, and includes a new introduction, Life after Postmodernism , which will be required reading for anyone interested in making sense of everyday life. It exposes the conceits of the postmodernist adventure and explores the political and personal commitments which are still possible in the amoral and fragmented postmodern world. This is a book about escapes and escape attempts. but the men and women in these pages are not escaping from the cramped cells and barred windows of a prison; they are fleeing from the suffocating press of routine and ritual. Their search is for meaning, novelty, progress and a sense of their true identity. Some escapers take a dramatic route away from mundane reality, but the real heroes of these pages are not criminals, outsiders, revolutionaries or cultural critics. They are rather the millions of men and women in our society who continually search for some escape from reality in their everyday life and find it in such diverse areas as hobbies, holidays, psychotherapy, art, music, games, fantasy, romantic love, sex, gambling and mass culture. Cohen and Taylor chronicle the anazing variety of devices we employ in order to persuade ourselves and others that we are truly individual, but they also warn about the precariousness of these escape attempts, the danger that they will drift into obsessions and madness, become undermined by self-consciousness, or lose thier potency as they are rendered banal or commercially co-opted. Packed with examples of popular culture and ironic accounts of how that culture creeps into every corner of our lives, Escape Attempts is a vitally important guide to how to live sucessfully in the amoral, consumerist world of postmodernism. Above all, it is a homage to the self, a celebration of the daily struggle to rise above social destiny.