The book explores the liminal aesthetics of U.S. cultural and literary practice. Interrogating the notion of a presumptive unity of the American experience, Moveable Designs argues that inner conflict, divisiveness, and contradiction are integral to the nation’s cultural designs, themes, and motifs. The study suggests that U.S. literary and cultural practice is permeated by ‘moveable designs’―flexible, yet constant features of hegemonial practice that constitute an integral element of American national self-fashioning. The naturally pervasive liminality of U.S. cultural production is the key to understanding the resilience of American culture. Moveable Designs looks at artistic expressions across various media types (literature, paintings, film, television), seeking to illuminate critical phases of U.S. American literature and culture―from the revolutionary years to the movements of romanticism, realism, and modernism, up to the postmodern era. It combines a wide array of approaches, from cultural history and social anthropology to phenomenology. Connecting an analysis of literary and cultural texts with approaches from design theory, the book proposes a new way of understanding American culture as design. It is one of the unique characteristics of American culture that it creates―or, rather, designs―potency out of its inner conflicts and apparent disunities. That which we describe as an identifiable ‘American identity’ is actually the product of highly vulnerable, alternating processes of dissolution and self-affirmation.
Author(s): Stefan L. Brandt
Series: Renewing the American Narrative
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 307
City: Cham
Preface
Praise for Moveable Designs, Liminal Aesthetics, and Cultural Production in America since 1772
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Welcome to the Twilight Zone
Moveable Fictions—Cultural (Dis)Unity and Boundary Transgression
The Designs of Literary and Cultural Practice
Design Thinking and the Cultural Field of ‘America’
The Longue Durée of Moveable Designs in American Cultural History
Part I: Theoretical Framework
Chapter 2: Moveable Designs: Liminal Aesthetics and Cultural Production
Designing Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast
America as Fiction—Literature as Performance
Liminal Aesthetics and Liquid Modernity
Culture as Design—The (Not So) Secret Lives of Aesthetic Objects
Part II: Contexts
Chapter 3: TransAmerica: Cultural Hybridity and Transgendered Desire from the Colonial Era to Modernity
Introduction: Heterogeneity and Transgendered Desire
The Making of ‘America’: From the Colonial Era to the Nation State
Revolutionary Compacts: Transgendered Imagery and the Invention of ‘Columbia’
Conclusion: From Transnational America to Transnation
Chapter 4: The ‘American in Chains’: (Cons)Piracy and the Specter of North Africa in U.S. Barbary Captivity Narratives
Introduction: North Africa in the Early U.S. Cultural Imagination
The Specter of Algiers in Barbary Captivity Narratives
Algiers as a Counter-Image to the Early U.S. Republic in The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania
Spaces of Imperialism in Slaves in Algiers and The Algerine Captive
Conclusion: U.S. Exceptionalism and the Birth of the Orient as America’s Other
Chapter 5: Open Doors, Closed Spaces: The Transatlantic Imaginary in American Urban Writing from the Post-Revolutionary Era to Modernism
Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of Cross-Atlantic Mapmaking
From Open City to Shrinking City
The Labyrinthine Aesthetics of the Walking City
Open Doors and Walled Streets: Atlantic Cities as Imagined Landscapes
Conclusion: Shades of the Open City in U.S. Transatlantic Writing
Part III: Case Studies
Chapter 6: White Bo(d)y in Wonderland: Cultural Alterity and Sexual Desire in Tod Browning’s Where East Is East (1929)
Introduction: Essentialist Topographies—Where East Is East, and West Is West
The Codes of Colonial Discourse
Economies of Stereotyping
Metonymic Displacement and Ethnic Masquerade
Metaphysical Condensation and Animal Imagery
Fetishization of the Orient
Allegories of (De-)Historicization
Comic Ethnicity and Explosive Body Language
Conclusion: The Uses and Abuses of Orientalist Imagery
Chapter 7: Cinematic Literature: Intermedial Aesthetics, Juvenile Rebellion, and Carnal Subjectivity in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
Introduction: J.D. Salinger—An Undercover Story
The Catcher in the Rye as a Cinematic Text
Juvenile Rebellion and the Rhetoric of Disgust
Conclusion: Carnal Identification and Cinematic Fiction
Chapter 8: Animal Laughter: Carnivalesque Humor and the Aesthetics of Dehierarchization in Mister Ed
Introduction: The Sitcom Genre and Carnivalesque Humor
Rendering the ‘Impossible’ Possible: Postcolonial Theory and the Animal Subaltern
Bestial Ambivalence and the Aesthetics of Shapeshifting
Pushing the Boundaries of Human and Non-human: Mister Ed as a Liminal Animal Denizen
Conclusion: Empowering the Subjugated Other
Part IV: State of Affairs and Outlook
Chapter 9: Astronautic Subjectivity: Postmodern Culture and the Embodiment of Space in American Science Fiction
Introduction: Fashioning the Astronautic Subject
Postmodern Subjectivity and the Body Without Organs
The Gender of Astronauts
Man as Mother, Or, Gender Trouble in Space
The Astronautic Subject as Cultural Figuration
Transsexual Galaxies: The Mechanics of Engenderneering
Conclusion: Burning Bridges, Engendering New Selves
Chapter 10: Coda: Thinking ‘America’ in the Age of the Liminal
Works Cited and Consulted
Primary Works
Filmography
Secondary Works
Index
