Moveable designs, liminal aesthetics, and cultural production in America since 1772 / Stefan L. Brandt.
Brandt, Stefan L., 1976-
2022
NX180.S6
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Title
Moveable designs, liminal aesthetics, and cultural production in America since 1772 / Stefan L. Brandt.
Author
Brandt, Stefan L., 1976-
ISBN
9783031136115 (electronic bk.)
303113611X (electronic bk.)
3031136101
9783031136108
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13611-5
Publication Details
Cham : Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (308 p.).
Item Number
10.1007/978-3-031-13611-5 doi
Call Number
NX180.S6
Dewey Decimal Classification
700.1030973
Summary
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 nations cultural designs, themes, and motifs. The study suggests that U.S. literary and cultural practice is permeated by moveable designsflexible, 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 culturefrom 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 createsor, rather, designspotency 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 Universitat Berlin, University of Siegen, and University of Vienna and was affiliated with Universita 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..
Note
Introduction: J.D. Salinger-An Undercover Story
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description
Description based on print version record.
Series
Renewing the American narrative.
Available in Other Form
Moveable Designs, Liminal Aesthetics, and Cultural Production in America Since 1772
MOVEABLE DESIGNS, LIMINAL AESTHETICS, AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN AMERICA SINCE 1772.
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Intro
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

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