Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession

Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession

by Greil Marcus (Author)

Synopsis

In life, Elvis Presley went from childhood poverty to stardom, from world fame to dissipation and early death. As Greil Marcus shows, Presley's journey after death takes him even further, pushing him beyond his own frontiers to merge with the American public consciousness - and the American subconscious. As he listens in on the public conversation that recreates Elvis after death, Marcus tracks the path of Presley's resurrection. He grafts together scattered fragments of the eclectic dialogue and shows what this strange obsession with a dead Elvis can tell us about America itself.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 03 Mar 1999

ISBN 10: 0674194225
ISBN 13: 9780674194229

Media Reviews
Go no further for the biggest thoughts about the biggest ever pop icon.
despising what Presley became, everyone is now in on--not the joke, but the remaking of their world.
Marcus's rapt attention to what Elvis continues to mean is both transmitted and justified in a splendid piece of critical art ... a marvelous and profane book about a cultural symbol of cultural symbol-making.--David Foster Wallace Los Angeles Times Book Review
Marcus shows that the rupture that was Elvis in 1954-57 lives on, below and above ground, glowing in grotesque and still dangerous half-life.--W.T. Lhamon, Jr. American Quarterly
The evidence Marcus has gathered suggests that Presley's posthumous appeal has to do with our ferocious ambivalence toward him, a blend of worship and revulsion, obeisance and revolutionary desire. Sympathetically despising what Presley became, everyone is now in on--not the joke, but the remaking of their world.--Eric Lott The Nation