Moveable Designs, Liminal Aesthetics, and Cultural Production in America since 1772

ISBN-13: 9783031136108 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 297 str.

Stefan L. Brandt

Opis

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. 

Spis treści

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

10 Coda: Thinking ‘America’ in the Age of the Liminal.

Works Cited and Consulted.

O autorze

Stefan L. Brandt is Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz and former President of the Austrian Association for American Studies. He was awarded professorial positions at Freie Universität Berlin, University of Siegen, and University of Vienna and was affiliated with Università Ca’ Foscari, Radboud Universiteit, University of Toronto, and Harvard University. Brandt specializes in American Literary and Cultural Studies, having published three monographs and (co-)edited eight anthologies, most recently Ecomasculinities. He is one of the founding members of the international journal AmLit – American Literatures as well as the European research network ‘Digital Studies.’  

Blurb

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. 

Stefan L. Brandt is Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz and former President of the Austrian Association for American Studies. He was awarded professorial positions at Freie Universität Berlin, University of Siegen, and University of Vienna and was affiliated with Università Ca’ Foscari, Radboud Universiteit, University of Toronto, and Harvard University. Brandt specializes in American Literary and Cultural Studies, having published three monographs and (co-)edited eight anthologies, most recently Ecomasculinities. He is one of the founding members of the international journal AmLit – American Literatures as well as the European research network ‘Digital Studies.’