Cigarettes Are Sublime

Richard Klein

Hardcover

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Cigarettes are bad for you; that is why they are so good. With its origins in the author's urgent desire to stop smoking, Cigarettes Are Sublime offers a provocative look at the literary, philosophical, and cultural history of smoking. Richard Klein focuses on the dark beauty, negative pleasures, and exacting benefits attached to tobacco use and to cigarettes in particular. His appreciation of paradox and playful use of hyperbole lead the way on this aptly ambivalent romp through the cigarette in war, movies (the "Humphrey Bogart cigarette"), literature, poetry, and the reflections of Sartre to show that cigarettes are a mixed blessing, precisely sublime.

Book Details

Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: Nov 23rd, 1993
Pages: 232
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 9.31in - 6.28in - 0.91in - 1.23lb
EAN: 9780822314011
Categories: • Semiotics & Theory

About the Author

Richard Klein is Professor of French at Cornell University and editor of Diacritics. He quit smoking while writing Cigarettes Are Sublime and has been nicotine-free ever since.

Praise for this book

"In "Cigarettes are Sublime," a cult classic of the literature of tobacco, Richard Klein connects the allure of cigarettes precisely to their dangers . . . ."
--Hendrik Hertzberg, "New Yorker"