American Dreams Suburban Nightmares Suburbia As A Narrative Space Between Utopia And Dystopia In Contemporary American Cinema

Author : Melanie Smicek
Publisher : Anchor Academic Publishing (aap_verlag)
ISBN 13 : 3954893215
Total Pages : 73 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares: Suburbia as a Narrative Space between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema written by Melanie Smicek and published by Anchor Academic Publishing (aap_verlag). This book was released on 2014-10 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The suburban landscape is inseparable from American culture. Suburbia does not only relate to the geographical concept, but also describes a cultural space incorporating people’s hopes for a safe and prosperous life. Suburbia marks a dynamic ideological space constantly influenced and recreated by both the events of everyday life and artistic discourse. Fictional texts do not merely represent suburbia, but also have a decisive role in the shaping of suburban spaces. The widely held idealized image of suburbia evolved in the 1950s. Today, reality deviates from the concept of suburbs projected back then, due to e.g. high divorce rates and an increase of crime. Nevertheless, the nostalgic view of the suburbs as the “Promised Land" has survived. Postwar critics object to this perception, considering the suburbs rather as depressing landscapes of mass-consumption, conformity and alienation. This book exemplifies the dualistic representation of suburbs in contemporary American cinema by analyzing Pleasantville, The Truman Show and American Beauty. It examines how utopian concepts of suburbia are created culturally and psychologically in the films, and how the underlying anxieties of the suburban experience, visualized by the dystopian narratives, challenge this ideal.

Author : Melanie Smicek
Publisher : diplom.de
ISBN 13 : 3954898217
Total Pages : 69 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares: Suburbia as a Narrative Space between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema written by Melanie Smicek and published by diplom.de. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The suburban landscape is inseparable from American culture. Suburbia does not only relate to the geographical concept, but also describes a cultural space incorporating people’s hopes for a safe and prosperous life. Suburbia marks a dynamic ideological space constantly influenced and recreated by both the events of everyday life and artistic discourse. Fictional texts do not merely represent suburbia, but also have a decisive role in the shaping of suburban spaces. The widely held idealized image of suburbia evolved in the 1950s. Today, reality deviates from the concept of suburbs projected back then, due to e.g. high divorce rates and an increase of crime. Nevertheless, the nostalgic view of the suburbs as the “Promised Land" has survived. Postwar critics object to this perception, considering the suburbs rather as depressing landscapes of mass-consumption, conformity and alienation. This book exemplifies the dualistic representation of suburbs in contemporary American cinema by analyzing Pleasantville, The Truman Show and American Beauty. It examines how utopian concepts of suburbia are created culturally and psychologically in the films, and how the underlying anxieties of the suburban experience, visualized by the dystopian narratives, challenge this ideal.

Author : Melanie Smicek
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9783656671411
Total Pages : 80 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Suburbia as a Narrative Space Between Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary American Cinema written by Melanie Smicek and published by . This book was released on 2014-06-25 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, grade: 1,0, University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: [Suburbia] has become the quintessential physical achievement of the United States; it is perhaps more representative of its culture than big cars, tall buildings, or professional football. Suburbia symbolizes the fullest, most unadulterated embodiment of contemporary culture. As Kenneth Jackson notes in his price-winning chronicle Crabgrass Frontier, the suburban landscape has become inseparable from American culture within the last two centuries. Nowadays living in the suburbs is the norm for most Americans, as since the 1990s, more than two third of the population lives in suburban districts. The term suburbia does not only relate to the geographical concept that differentiates these dwellings from urban or rural areas, but also describes a cultural, ideological space incorporating Americans' hopes for an economically safe and prosperous family life. Closely tied to the history and culture of the USA, suburbia marks a dynamic ideological space that is constantly influenced and recreated by both the events of everyday life and artistic discourse. Thus, the depiction of suburban life functions as a central narrative element in numerous works of American literature, art and film. In this context, fictional texts do not merely represent suburbia, but also have a decisive role in the shaping of suburban spaces. The treatment of suburbia as a cultural space in American movies is of special interest, as their commercial success and popularity make films important cultural texts. As Spigel notes, "television and new media redirect our experience of private and public spheres" and therefore highly influence our perceptions of the spaces we inhabit. Regarding suburban landscapes, this aspect is particularly interesting because the inexorable rise of the television practically coincided with the postwar suburb

Author : Moss-Wellington Wyatt Moss-Wellington
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474454348
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Narrative Humanism written by Moss-Wellington Wyatt Moss-Wellington and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-13 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism, asking how we can use stories to complicate our understanding of others, and questioning the ethics and efficacy of attempts to represent human social complexity in fiction. With case studies of films like Parenthood (1989), American Beauty (1999), Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and The Kids Are All Right (2010), this original study synthesises leading discourses on media and cognition, evolutionary anthropology, literature and film analysis into a new theory of the storytelling instinct.

Author : David R. Coon
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781461952053
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Look Closer written by David R. Coon and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Look Closer examines contemporary media texts that use American suburbia not just as a setting, but as a central component of narrative and thematic development. It discusses the myth of suburban perfection popularized by postwar sitcoms and advertisements and explores how the directors and producers behind today's films and television series use the spaces of suburbia to tell stories about America as well as critique the conservative ideologies that underpin the suburban American Dream.

Author : Robert M. Fogelson
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300124170
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bourgeois Nightmares written by Robert M. Fogelson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The restrictive covenants, many of which are still commonly employed, tell us as much about American society today as a century ago."--Jacket.

Author : Saskia Fürst
Publisher : LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN 13 : 3643909314
Total Pages : 197 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book US American Expressions of Utopian and Dystopian Visions written by Saskia Fürst and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2017 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection takes stock of current discourses in American studies on the political valence of American utopias, be they as religious diasporas or as socialist experiments, fantastic or realist, successful or failed. The included essays take into account the spatiality of utopias (especially in their visionary scope), analyze currents in literary utopias, and look at dystopian visions in literature. This volume strives to keep alive the long tradition of writers, artists, and scholars who warned against imminent disasters and envisioned ways to counter such ruinous bearings. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 17) [Subject: Sociology, Literary Studies]

Author : Kathryn Hume
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 025205413X
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Dream, American Nightmare written by Kathryn Hume and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this celebration of contemporary American fiction, Kathryn Hume explores how estrangement from America has shaped the fiction of a literary generation, which she calls the Generation of the Lost Dream. In breaking down the divisions among standard categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, Hume identifies shared core concerns, values, and techniques among seemingly disparate and unconnected writers including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ralph Ellison, Russell Banks, Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walker Percy, N. Scott Momaday, John Updike, Toni Morrison, William Kennedy, Julia Alvarez, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Don DeLillo. Hume explores fictional treatments of the slippage in the immigrant experience between America's promise and its reality. She exposes the political link between contemporary stories of lost innocence and liberalism's inadequacies. She also invites us to look at the literary challenge to scientific materialism in various searches for a spiritual dimension in life. The expansive future promised by the American Dream has been replaced, Hume finds, by a sense of tarnished morality and a melancholy loss of faith in America's exceptionalism. American Dream, American Nightmare examines the differing critiques of America embedded in nearly a hundred novels and points to the source for recovery that appeals to many of the authors.

Author : Amy Maria Kenyon
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 0814339131
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dreaming Suburbia written by Amy Maria Kenyon and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-17 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreaming Suburbia is a cultural and historical interpretation of the political economy of postwar American suburbanization. Questions of race, class, and gender are explored through novels, film, television and social criticism where suburbia features as a central theme. Although suburbanization had important implications for cities and for the geo-politics of race, critical considerations of race and urban culture often receive insufficient attention in cultural studies of suburbia. This book puts these questions back in the frame by focusing on Detroit, Dearborn and Ford history, and the local suburbs of Inkster and Garden City. Covering such topics as the political and cultural economy of suburban sprawl, the interdependence of city and suburb, and local acts of violence and crises during the 1967 riots, the text examines the making of a physical place, its cultural effects and social exclusions. The perspectives of cultural history, American studies, social science, and urban studies give Dreaming Suburbia an interdisciplinary appeal.

Author : Jean Pfaelzer
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN 13 : 0822974428
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Utopian Novel in America, 1886–1896 written by Jean Pfaelzer and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1800s, Americans flocked to cities, immigration, slums, and unemployment burgeoned, and America's role in foreign affairs grew. This period also spawned a number of fictional glimpses into the future. After the publication of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888, there was an outpouring of utopian fantasy, many of which promoted socialism, while others presented refined versions of capitalism. Jean Pfaelzer's study traces the impact of the utopian novel and the narrative structures of these sentimental romances. She discusses progressive, pastoral, feminist, and apocalyptic utopias, as well as the genre's parodic counterpart, the dystopia.