Jet Lag (Object Lessons) - Softcover

Lee, Christopher J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501323229 ISBN 13: 9781501323225

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

Synopsis

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

What exactly is jet lag? And, more importantly, how do we live with jet lag? Jet lag is a momentary condition resulting from the human body and its inner clock being pitched against the time-leaping effects of modern aviation. Yet, as Christopher J. Lee examines, it has much more to tell us about time, technology, and the human body. Taken further, jet lag articulates something essential about the accelerated world we live in. It presents an alternative view of globalization and its discomforting effects at the personal level. Tracing physiological, temporal, technological, and cultural meanings, Jet Lag ultimately positions its title subject as an allegory about our intrinsic human limits in the face of modern innovation, a hidden cost of our global cosmopolitanism today. 

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

About this title

About the Author:

Christopher J. Lee is an associate professor of history at Lafayette College, USA. He has published four previous books and travels frequently. 

Review:

"No one in Shakespeare ever knew jet lag; it is the phenomenon of the 'jet age.' It names the zone where modern glamor met its match in one's exhausted human body. Jet lag is the modern limbo, where humans wait to catch up again with the frenzy of modern time. In this beguiling book, Christopher J. Lee opens up the whole panorama of jetting off, arriving, and sleeping it off. From T. S. Eliot to Dalí, from Chaplin to Lost in Translation, he shows how jet lag is the deep dark symptom of modern life's struggle with time. Jet Lag is a profound and witty meditation on a key secret of modernity." - Enda Duffy, Arnhold Presidential Department Chair, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Jet Lag is a revelatory and compelling meditation on the temporal and affective dislocations of global capitalism. Christopher J. Lee lucidly maps the dissonant incompatibility between human beings and technological acceleration but he also insists on the importance of our imaginative cultural and aesthetic responses to the many systemic derangements of individual experience. -- Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University, USA, and author of 24/7

"Reading Lee's Marxist analysis is like taking a flight with Gramsci in the next seat.... Lee has a gift for making surprising yet apposite associations. We get diversions into Picasso's "Guernica", the cover of Led Zeppelin's eponymous album of 1969, the thoughts of Aristotle, Edmund Husserl and Salvador Dali, hot air balloons, and Caribbean zombie culture (any survivor of the sixteen-hour Hong Kong-New York flight might guess at the relevance). He is best, though, when contemplating the "global capitalist spectacle" of airports, with their unifying corporate flags for individual airlines and the ubiquitous brands displayed down polished corridors...."-- Tom Zoellner, The Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501323229
• ISBN 13: 9781501323225
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200