Stranger America: A Narrative Ethics of Exclusion (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture)
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- Synopsis
- Contradictory ideals of egalitarianism and self-reliance haunt America’s democratic state. We need look no further than Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and victory for proof that early twentieth-century anxieties about individualism, race, and the foreign or intrusive "other" persist today. In Stranger America, Josh Toth tracks and delineates these anxieties in America’s aesthetic production, finally locating a potential narrative strategy for circumnavigating them.Toth’s central focus is, simply, strangeness—or those characters who adamantly resist being fixed in any given category of identity. As with the theorists employed (Nancy, i ek, Derrida, Freud, Hegel), the subjects and literature considered are as encompassing as possible: from the work of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen to that of Philip K. Dick, Woody Allen, Larry David, and Bob Dylan; from the rise of nativism in the early twentieth century to object-oriented ontology and the twenty-first-century zombie craze; from ragtime and the introduction of sound in American cinema to the exhaustion of postmodern metafiction.Toth argues that American literature, music, film, and television can show us the path toward a new ethic, one in which we organize identity around the stranger rather than resorting to tactics of pure exclusion or inclusion. Ultimately, he provides a new narrative approach to otherness that seeks to realize a truly democratic form of community.
- Copyright:
- 2018
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 298 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780813941127
- Publisher:
- University of Virginia Press
- Date of Addition:
- 10/19/20
- Copyrighted By:
- the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Language Arts, Law, Legal Issues and Ethics, Philosophy, Politics and Government
- Grade Levels:
- College Freshman
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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