DISSERTATION
National Transgressions: Representing the Mobile, Boundary-Busting American During Periods of Major Economic Crisis
Deborah E. R. Hanan
University of Southern California, 2011; 308 pages; AAT 3466010
This dissertation investigates how embodied tropes of mobility and transgression have circulated in U.S. entertainment media when apprehensions over employment, housing, and the economy have dominated the national psyche. It assesses the nation's "crisis in representation," in which competing ideals of unfettered liberty and sedentary acquisitional culture vie for dominance within the American collective. More specifically, this project focuses on media representations of unregulated white male mobility and transgression: boundary-busting characteristics that have served as cornerstones upon and against which an "exceptional" archetypal American character has been constructed. Assessing popular illustrated, television and film constructions of "dispossessed by choice" Americans (e.g. "tramps," "hobos," "white gypsies," Travellers, bourgeois adventurers, and carnies), I discuss the ways in which nomadic white males have been represented as both standard bearers of an American esprit de corps and principal violators of the nation's ideological geographies. I examine mass distributed products circulated during the Long Depression (1873-1896), Great Depression (1929-1939) and Global Economic Crisis (2000-2010) as artistic, historical, political and economic artifacts to demonstrate how representations of the peripatetic allegorical American have not only served to reflect a variety of ideological interests, they have also helped maintain an ongoing debate concerning the nation's competing ideals of unfettered liberty and sedentary acquisitional capitalism.
As an interdisciplinary project, this study builds upon and responds to existing discourses in media cultural studies, American studies, cultural geography, sociology, political science and cultural history. Transgressing more orthodox applications, I explore queer theory's applicability to geopolitical concerns by considering the "impossible object" of the American project and deconstructing U.S. identity into two distinct, culturally maintained subjectivities. I have taken this approach to argue that understanding America's imagined and narrated community requires that it be examined through both its national and imperial symbolic caches. By providing an in depth analysis of how embodied tropes unique to the American collective have evolved over time, this dissertation suggests an analytical model for charting the perceived health and wellbeing of any ideologically-bound and territorialized formation in relation to the perceived life cycle of their associated empire.
PROQUEST INDEXING (DOCUMENT DETAILS)
Advisor: Sarah Banet-Weiser
Committee members: G. Thomas Goodnight, Jonathan Taplin, Steven J. Ross
School: University of Southern California
Department: Annenberg School of Communication
School Location: United States -- California
Keyword(s): Economic crisis, Entertainment media, Crisis in representation, Cultural history, Cultural media studies, Mobility, National symbolic, Transgression
Source: DAI-A 72/10, Apr 2012
Source type: Dissertation
Subjects: American studies, Multimedia Communications, Mass communications
Publication Number: AAT 3466010
ISBN: 9781124787534
Document URL: http://proquest.umi.comProQuest document ID: 2429557701