Content area
Full text
How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, by Laura Kipnis. New York, NY: MetropoUtan Books, 2010. 209pp. $24.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780805089790.
In How to Become a Scandal, Laura Kipnis discusses the social functions of the public scandal, analyzing the self-destructive tendencies of the offenders and how the pubUc builds such juicy stories. Kipnis focuses on individual scandals rather than institutional ones, "which are a different kettle of fish" (p. 21). The book aims to develop the "virgin terrain" of scandal theory as a cultural phenomenon (p. 7), and to make us more aware of our tendency toward split consciousness, in which the scandalizers "keep "forgetting" about social consequences," and the audiences "keep "forgetting" about how routine such lapses are" (p. 13). The book is divided into two parts,...