cover image Unruly Voices: Essays on Democracy, Civility, and the Human Imagination

Unruly Voices: Essays on Democracy, Civility, and the Human Imagination

Mark Kingwell. Biblioasis (Consortium, dist.), $18.95 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-926845-84-5

Most of these 17 essays focus on the degradation of contemporary political discourse, urban life, and culture. University of Toronto philosopher and Harper’s contributor Kingwell (The World We Want) notes that in lieu of “political literacy,” political conversation today is too often characterized by “insult-swapping and bogus claims,” so that “we can no longer hear, let alone appreciate... a just idea.” In a fascinating essay entitled “The American Gigantic,” he argues that the American dream has been transformed into a kind of “zombie virus, consuming resources and citizens alike in an endless round of renewed desire... obscuring the realities of class and race.” Examining such social and existential issues as the role of luck in accumulating political or other power and the way that “desirable objects” reinforce a sense of “class superiority,” Kingwell ranges far and wide. He cites not only to such philosophers as Plato, Heidegger, and Rawls, but also to such writers as Melville and literary critics such as Northrop Frye, not to mention such cinematic cult classics as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (part of a discussion on the “uncanny” in film). Though Kingwell’s prose can be elusively associative and his intellectual allusions sometimes esoteric (Francis Fukuyama’s thought is marked by “Hegelian dialectics filtered through Alexandre Kojève”), he is a perceptive and imaginative social critic. Agent: Melissa Chinchillo, Fletcher & Company. (Oct.)