Moveable Designs, Liminal Aesthetics, and Cultural Production in America since 1772
In: Renewing the American Narrative
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 -- 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 to Transnation -- 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 -- 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.
