Overview
- 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)
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Theoretical Framework
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Contexts
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Case Studies
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State of Affairs and Outlook
Keywords
- American Cultural History
- American Literary History
- American Visual Art
- Astronautic Subjectivity
- Barbary Captivity Narratives
- Cultural Production
- Design Thinking
- Early American Literature
- Gender
- Liminality
- Liquid Modernity
- Moveable Designs
- Orientalism
- Postmodernism
- Science Fiction
- Silent Cinema
- Sitcoms
- Transatlantic Urbanity
- Whiteness
- Young Adult Fiction
About this book
Reviews
—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
About the author
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