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 Duréeof 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 toTransnation
4 The ‘American in Chains’: (Cons)Piracy and the Specter of North Africa in U.S. Barbary Captivity Narratives
Introduction: NorthAfrica 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.