Stranger America : a narrative ethics of exclusion / Josh Toth.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Toth, Josh, author.

Series:

Cultural frames, framing culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethics--United States--21st century.

Ethics.

Social aspects.

United States--Social aspects--21st century.

United States.

Physical Description:

xii, 282 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, [2018]

Summary:

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, Žižek, 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.

Contents:

Introduction: both members of this club

Part I. Being withdrawn

Melancholics and specters: between James Weldon Johnson and Alan Crosland

Promising intrusion in Nella Larsen's Passing

Articulations of ambiguity: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and James McBride

Part II. Being eaten

Touching Herman Melville's "Bartleby" (and other zombie narratives)

Consuming androids in the work of Philip K. Dick

The chameleon and the dictator in Woody Allen's Zelig

Part III. Being given

The autonarratives of Ernest Hemingway (and others)

The divinely unshareable self: from Edward Albee to Larry David

Bob Dylan's autoplasticity.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-274) and index.

ISBN:

0813941113

9780813941110

9780813941103

0813941105

OCLC:

1011020731