-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Jennifer White, Suicide Movies: Social Patterns 1900-2009 By Steven Stack and Barbara Bowman Hogrefe Publishing. 2011. 298 pages. $59.00 (cloth), Social Forces, Volume 93, Issue 3, March 2015, Page e87, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sos147
- Share Icon Share
Extract
As a scholar and practitioner who has worked in the field of suicide prevention for over 20 years and as a regular theatergoer, I welcomed the opportunity to review the recently published book, Suicide Movies: Social Patterns 1900-2009, by Steven Stack and Barbara Bowman. The authors' interests in exploring what they call the “social causes” of suicide and suicidal behavior, using American film as their site of analysis, combined with their observation that “the study of suicide has been marked by a literal hegemony of the highly individualistic or psychiatric perspective” (3), strongly resonated with many of my own recent concerns and scholarly interests in the topic.Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle … The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life. ∼Herbert Marcuse
Issue Section:
Book Reviews
You do not currently have access to this article.