Description - Profanity, Obscenity and the Media by Melvin J. Lasky
Lasky's text documents the possibly terminal crisis affecting honest, thoughtful and independent journalism in the Western world. It extends the research in his first volume, and deepens the interpretation. It also seeks to add the personal touch of both wit and anecdote expressed by an experienced international journalist and historian. The central chapters on the "F-word" carry the public emergence of the infamous "expletive deleted" beyond the conventional lexicographer's approach. Here is the tortuous struggle of a once Puritanized literary culture writing to break free of censorship and self-censorship. Lasky critically evaluates the historic effort of the avant-garde of "dirty realism" to find a path towards what he calls "a usable profanity". In the meantime, newspaper style books become comic texts, as asterisks take over from square brackets and millions of readers purse their lips and indulge in "participatory obscenity". In dealing with the phenomenon of profanity, the volume adds another dimension to Lasky's thesis on mass culture's trivialization of real social and political phenomena.
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