Your search for: alcoholics

Based on long-term observation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the author focuses on cultural rather than personal causes of drug dependence. The author also discusses how the symbolic action of AA language and culture is the key to recovery. This study yields critical information about the development and ...

Based on long-term observation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the author focuses on cultural rather than personal causes of drug dependence. The author also discusses how the symbolic action of AA language and culture is the key to recovery. This study yields critical information about the development and practice of alcoholism and other drug dependence. Through the shared linguistic and cultural interaction of AA, the U.S. cultural ideology that emphasizes individualism, personal achievement, self-control, and self-reliance is shown to result in conflict; thus the gap between the perceived ideal and reality intensifies feelings of separation, alienation, and isolation leading to dependency.

Based on an ethnographic study spanning four years, George H. Jensen's Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis calls upon Bakhtinian theory to analyze storytelling in AA.

Jensen introduces his study with an analysis of "Bill W.'s Story" as it appears in the first chapter of AA's ...

Based on an ethnographic study spanning four years, George H. Jensen's Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis calls upon Bakhtinian theory to analyze storytelling in AA.

Jensen introduces his study with an analysis of "Bill W.'s Story" as it appears in the first chapter of AA's central text, Alcoholics Anonymous. Drawing on Walter Ong's work on orality and literacy, he argues that "Bill W.'s Story" as it appears in print cannot fully capture the oral tradition of storytelling as it occurs in AA meetings.

Jensen discusses storytelling as practiced by the Washingtonians, a temperance organization much like AA. He also discusses the influence of the spiritual program of the Oxford Group (an international and interdenominational religious movement seeking to recapture the enthusiasm and dedication of first-century Christianity) on the development of AA's Twelve Steps.

Jensen introduces Bakhtin's theory of the relationship between the author and the hero of a text, using Lillian Roth's,autobiographies as counterexamples of AA talks. He explains how AA meetings provide an example of what Bakhtin meant by carnival, a process through which humor, irony, and parody supply a mechanism for questioning commonly held beliefs. AA talks, Jensen argues, are fragmented, yet achieve coherence through the interweaving of two important chronotopes. Finally, using Bakhtin's discussion of heroes in autobiography, Jensen discusses the kinds of heroes one typically finds in AA talks.

In this fascinating history of alcohol in postwar American culture, Lori Rotskoff draws on short stories, advertisements, medical writings, and Hollywood films to investigate how gender norms and ideologies of marriage intersected with scientific and popular ideas about drinking and alcoholism

...

In this fascinating history of alcohol in postwar American culture, Lori Rotskoff draws on short stories, advertisements, medical writings, and Hollywood films to investigate how gender norms and ideologies of marriage intersected with scientific and popular ideas about drinking and alcoholism.

After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, recreational drinking became increasingly accepted among white, suburban, middle-class men and women. But excessive or habitual drinking plagued many families. How did people view the "problem drinkers" in their midst? How did husbands and wives learn to cope within an "alcoholic marriage?" And how was drinking linked to broader social concerns during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War era?

By the 1950s, Rotskoff explains, mental health experts, movie producers, and members of self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon helped bring about a shift in the public perception of alcoholism from "sin" to "sickness." Yet alcoholism was also viewed as a family problem that expressed gender-role failure for both women and men. On the silver screen (in movies such as "The Lost Weekend and "The Best Years of Our Lives) and on the printed page (in stories by writers such as John Cheever), in hospitals and at Twelve Step meetings, chronic drunkenness became one of the most pressing public health issues of the day.

This book provides an extensive review of current literature on the interrelationship between alcohol use/abuse and sexuality. Topics addressed include the effects of alcohol on sexual responses of male and female social drinkers and male and female alcoholics; the incidence of sexual deviance in ...

This book provides an extensive review of current literature on the interrelationship between alcohol use/abuse and sexuality. Topics addressed include the effects of alcohol on sexual responses of male and female social drinkers and male and female alcoholics; the incidence of sexual deviance in male alcoholics; marital sexual adjustment in male alcoholics; the relationship of sex victimization to the intoxicated state in female victims; marital sexual adjustment in actively drinking male and female alcoholics; influence of chronic alcoholism upon homosexual and lesbian relationships; sexual adjustment of single recovering female alcoholics.