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

  • Book
  • © 2022

Overview

Authors:
  1. Stefan L. Brandt

    1. Department of American Studies, University of Graz, Graz, Styria, Austria

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  • Holds that the liminality of U.S. cultural production is the key to understanding the resilience of American culture
  • Suggests that the motif of boundary transgression is integral to the nation’s cultural designs, themes, and motifs
  • Analyses literary & cultural texts with approaches from design theory to suggest America literally designs itself

Part of the book series: Renewing the American Narrative (RAN)

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xx
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  2. Introduction: Welcome to the Twilight Zone

    • Stefan L. Brandt
    Pages 1-27

  3. Theoretical Framework

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 29-29
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    2. Moveable Designs : Liminal Aesthetics and Cultural Production

      • Stefan L. Brandt
      Pages 31-57

  6. State of Affairs and Outlook

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 215-215
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    2. Astronautic Subjectivity: Postmodern Culture and the Embodiment of Space in American Science Fiction

      • Stefan L. Brandt
      Pages 217-252

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

      • Stefan L. Brandt
      Pages 253-256

  7. Back Matter

    Pages 257-297
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Keywords

About this book

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. 

Reviews

“A sweeping, sophisticated study of American cultural production from the 1770s to the present, Moveable Designs uncovers a liminal imaginary of boundary crossing, heterogeneity and transcendence, desirous of negating the conflict and divisiveness of the nation. Using an eclectic array of theoretical perspectives from design theory to critical whiteness studies, Brandt brilliantly uncovers the heterotopian dimensions of canonical writers such as Henry James and Salinger and TV series such as Mister Ed.”—Malini Johar Schueller, Professor of English and Director of the Asian American Studies Certificate Program at the University of Florida, and author of Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan

“This book is a hugely inspiring and much welcome contribution to the growing literature on liminality. Brandt invites the reader into a fascinating journey across liminal aesthetics, literature, design, cinema and carnivalesque humor. It is an entertaining and deeply engaging travel through space and time, from the boundary of the gendered body to outer space. On the road we learn something new about the American cultural experience. We also learn something quite crucial about how to make sense of the world in which we all live through the prism of liminality. Hugely recommended.”

—Bjørn Thomassen, Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University, Denmark, and author of Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between

“A bold and dazzling contribution to the study of American literature and culture. In this expansive book, Brandt makes the convincing case that transgressivity, restlessness, and inner conflict have been America’s most enduring features since the nation’s founding. They are part of the ‘design’ of the U.S., he argues, which hegemonic culture fashions into a fragile semblance of coherence and unity that is always already splintering internally from its social and political contradictions.”

—Thomas Heise, Associate Professor, Pennsylvania State University (Abington), and author of The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel and Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture

“This book is a rich and rewarding dialogue about the history of American self-fashioning that illuminates the ways in which cultural texts have marked, negotiated, and crossed boundaries to foster a hegemonic image and identity. Impressive in its scope and range of examples, it takes readers on a revealing tour through American literature and culture that highlights the centrality of liminality to the fabrication of unity. Of special importance is its attention to design and its use of the concept of design thinking to understand the American experience, which allows the reader to see America anew. This work has special urgency at this moment of apparent disunity and conflict.”

—C. Richard King, Professor and Chair of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences, Columbia College Chicago, and author of Beyond Hate: White Power and Popular Culture

“In an interdisciplinary tour de force, Brandt masterfully develops breathtakingly nuanced readings of seemingly well-worn theoretical traditions, from intersectionality to historicism. He then applies his enlivened methodologies to as wide an array of texts as can be imagined, from canonical literature to the television sitcom. In the endlessly fascinating pages of this book, Brandt identifies a complex America that is anything but what it at first seems. Moveable Designs is a great book about the United States, one that is far better than the country deserves, but offers what the country so desperately needs.”

—Walter Metz, Professor of Film Studies, School of Media Arts in the College of Arts and Media at Southern Illinois University, co-editor of Film Criticism, and vice president of the Literature/Film Association

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of American Studies, University of Graz, Graz, Styria, Austria

    Stefan L. Brandt

About the author

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.’  

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Moveable Designs, Liminal Aesthetics, and Cultural Production in America since 1772

  • Authors: Stefan L. Brandt

  • Series Title: Renewing the American Narrative

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13611-5

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-13610-8Published: 01 December 2022

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-13613-9Published: 01 December 2023

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-13611-5Published: 30 November 2022

  • Series ISSN: 2524-8332

  • Series E-ISSN: 2524-8340

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XX, 297

  • Number of Illustrations: 32 b/w illustrations, 10 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: American Culture, Audio-Visual Culture, Aesthetics, Literary Theory, Arts

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