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Like most semiotic texts, Baudrillard's America is excellent conversation and passable reading. I preferred this to Barthes' "Mythologies," and I believe the comparison is apt – both works engage in symbols, meaning, and all that fun post-moder(7/10)
Like most semiotic texts, Baudrillard's America is excellent conversation and passable reading. I preferred this to Barthes' "Mythologies," and I believe the comparison is apt – both works engage in symbols, meaning, and all that fun post-modernist stuff that's more interesting to think about yourself than it is to hear about from someone else.
However, Barthes' writing is largely about French culture, a 20th-century French culture with which I have limited familiarity. Baudrillard writes with relative cohesion about a single subject, Reagan's America, and his analyses of various cities, cultural hallmarks, and historical junctures are more accessible to a reader like me.
I enjoyed reading this as I took the train from New York to Seattle in July 2026. It was a short book, but I was able to appreciate it in depth because I was getting the real contrast between the cities and the countryside, taking in Baudrillard's idea of American desert while also understanding he could never see the wild contrasts of the United States as lucidly as someone like Edward Abbey.
The excesses and contradictions of the 80s are still relevant today, as are their symbols and meaning. The book was short enough to not exhaust the reader. It coincided with a cross-country trip I was taking. These reasons alone prevented me from totally turning off these kinds of thinkers. Maybe I'll give Foucault a shot....more
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