Richard Sennett's "The Fall of Public Man"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Richard Sennett's observations of people in the 18th Century, which he considers the Gold Age of urban life, are that people reflective all economic levels of society, lived their lives in almost continuous performance and paraded themselves about publicly in wildly expressive costumes. The author points out that there are powerful similarities between Sennett's themes of real time play-acting drama, in which 18th Century Parisians are viewed as characters in an ongoing interactive theatrical environment, and Levi-Strauss' anthropological narrative as he leaves the Calcutta Hotel and becomes "the center of a ballet". The paper concludes that, if Sennett were to describe the frustration urban Americans experience in bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic, he would likely allude to narcissism.

From the Paper:

"Sennett's book "The Fall of Public Man", which, in brief summary, is an attempt to create and justify a theory that has to do with how people, social relations, and the drama of intimacy are going through - and have gone through - dramatic changes in American urban society. His theory, Sennett explains, is one that attempts to explain the "confusion" that has "arisen between public and intimate life." Masses of people are concerned with "their single life histories and particular emotions as never before," he writes; but in the process of people being concerned they are falling into a "trap" rather than being "liberated."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Axhausen, K. W. 2000. Geographies of Somewhere: A Review of Urban Literature. Urban Studies 37 (September): 1849-1864.
• Barth, Gunther. 1977. Richard Sennett: The Fall of Public Man. American Historical Review 82 (December): 1214 - 1215.
• Berman, Marshall. 1977. Facades at Face Value: The Fall of Public Man. The Nation (August): 118-121.
• Kimball, Roger. 1991. Academic Psychobabble, or, Richard Sennett goes to town. The New Criterion, Retrieved August 2, 2006, from http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/09/may91/sennett.htm.
• Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1973. Tristes Tropiques. New York: Penguin Books.

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• Analytical Essay # 71106 : "The Fall of the House of Usher"

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