Shopping Cart Pantheism

Glorifying consumerism as the de facto religion of our time, Shopping Cart Pantheism offers a preposterous yet challenging invitation to participate in commodity worship. As our narrator meanders the Las Vegas Strip, its sites and monuments become examples of Christian sainthood, miracles, worship, and dogma now transformed into icons of consumerism. Satiric, witty, and deeply insightful, Shopping Cart Pantheism reveals the fraught beginnings of the twenty-first century’s most pervasive neurosis.

AUTHOR

Jeanne Randolph

Jeanne Randolph is one of Canada’s foremost cultural theorists. She is the author of the influential book Psychoanalysis & Synchronized Swimming (1991) as well as Symbolization and Its Discontents (1997), Why Stoics Box (2003), and Ethics of Luxury (2007). Dr. Randolph is also known as an engaging lecturer and performance artist. In universities and galleries across Canada, England, Australia, and Spain, she has spoken on topics ranging from the aesthetics of Barbie to the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

Reviews

Both perplexing and delightful, Jeanne Randolph’s writing is rooted in eclectic research and a deeply fertile imagination… Funny, smart, and engaging, Randolph spins a kaleidoscope of vignettes of Vegas and intricately wrought meditations on materialist culture… Steeped in history, theology, and Freudian psychoanalysis, Shopping Cart Pantheism is intellectual but accessible, and a whole lot of fun.—Publishers Weekly

A witty, genre-bending narrative that joyfully combines social satire, cultural criticism and off-beat humour. Think of A Modest Proposal narrated by a woman who visits Las Vegas armed only with “an active subconscious and lots of nap time.”–Méira Cook