Cultural Career of Coolness

Today, coolness is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles. The Cultural Career of Coolness explores the history of the term as a metaphor for affect control and aesthetic detachment, charts various cultural practices of coolness in the United States and Japan, and links them to the rationalization of intimate relations and an incorporation of disaffection in modernity.

Edited by Ulla Haselstein; Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit; Catrin Gersdorf and Elena Giannoulis - Contributions by Joel Dinerstein; Sophia Frese; Jens Heise; Michael Kinski; Jim McGuigan; Catherine Newmark; Aviad E. Raz; Paul Roquet and Daniel Selden