George Cotkin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190218478
- eISBN:
- 9780190218508
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190218478.003.0022
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century, Cultural History
The New Sensibility seemed to have its apotheosis in Las Vegas, a city predicated upon excess and liberation from traditional bounds. Not only did Tom Wolfe write about the city in these terms, but ...
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The New Sensibility seemed to have its apotheosis in Las Vegas, a city predicated upon excess and liberation from traditional bounds. Not only did Tom Wolfe write about the city in these terms, but architects Venturi and Scott Brown looked at the landscape and found it fascinating. In Learning from Las Vegas, a book that some designate as opening the era of the postmodern, they analyzed the surfaces and signs of Vegas, exulting in its eclecticism. Hunter S. Thompson, in his bestselling book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, had a less pleasurable encounter with the city, inhabiting its excess and interpreting the city as exemplary of the death of the American dream. But in his fevered prose, excessive in its drug-induced paranoia, he created a work that fits firmly within the New Sensibility.Less
The New Sensibility seemed to have its apotheosis in Las Vegas, a city predicated upon excess and liberation from traditional bounds. Not only did Tom Wolfe write about the city in these terms, but architects Venturi and Scott Brown looked at the landscape and found it fascinating. In Learning from Las Vegas, a book that some designate as opening the era of the postmodern, they analyzed the surfaces and signs of Vegas, exulting in its eclecticism. Hunter S. Thompson, in his bestselling book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, had a less pleasurable encounter with the city, inhabiting its excess and interpreting the city as exemplary of the death of the American dream. But in his fevered prose, excessive in its drug-induced paranoia, he created a work that fits firmly within the New Sensibility.
