The fiction of America: performance and the cultural imaginary in literature and film

Abstract

The Fiction of juxtaposes classic literature of the American Renaissance with twentieth-century popular culture-pairing, for instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Finding Nemo, Walt Whitman with Spider-man, and Hester Prynne with Madonna - to investigate how the Americanness of American culture constitutes itself in the interplay of the cultural imaginary and performance. Conceptualizing America as a transhistorical practice, Susanne Hamscha reveals disruptive, spectral moments in the narrative of America that confront American culture with its inherent inconsistencies.