Introduction: Welcome to the Twilight Zone

Brandt, Stefan L.

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-13611-5_1

Stefan L. Brandt³

Part of the book series: Renewing the American Narrative ((RAN))

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Abstract

This chapter introduces the concept of ‘moveable fictions’ as a set of variable aesthetic patterns in hegemonic cultural practice that function as symbolic reference points for processes of national self-formation. Interconnecting approaches from cultural theory and ‘design thinking,’ the section suggests a view of American society in which ‘word-building’ (Weltentwerfung) is communicated through the motifs of oscillation and boundary crossing. The cultural field of ‘America,’ I argue, is designed through the complementary pair of self and other, the interplay of an imagined center and an imagined periphery. Since the nation’s beginnings in the colonial era, ‘moveable designs’ have dominated the process of cultural self-fashioning, engendering a hegemonic practice that symbolically integrates contradictory and ambiguous elements to render the notion of a unified self. Employing Bourdieu’s notion of ‘cultural production,’ the chapter sketches the emergence of ‘America’ as an act of invention grounded in the construction of the ‘other’ as a complementary force. This dynamic ties in with the paradigm of mobility that has substantially shaped the identity of the new republic, testifying to the longue durée of moveable designs in the American cultural imagination.

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Notes

1.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964; London: Arrow Books, 2004).
2.
See Adam Chandler, “How Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast Has Become a Bestseller in France,” The Atlantic (23 Nov. 2015), https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/11/ernest-hemingway-paris-attacks-a-moveable-feast/417294/ (accessed 20 May 2022).
3.
Catherine Keyser, “An All-Too-Moveable Feast: Ernest Hemingway and the Stakes of Terroir,” Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities, 2.1 (Winter 2014): 10–23; 11.
4.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and introd. by Randal Johnson (1993; Cambridge, UK: Polity P, 2017).
5.
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1977), 75.
6.
Ibid., 91.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Michael Niblett, World Literature and Ecology (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 4.
9.
While the book’s full title is Moveable Designs, Liminal Aesthetics, and Cultural Production in America since 1772, all future references in the text will use the shortened version Moveable Designs.
10.
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford UP, 1985); Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2015). See also J.M.Q. Davies, Blake’s Milton Designs: The Dynamics of Meaning (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill P, 1993). Other recent attempts to employ design theory for literary and cultural studies include the following anthologies: Stephan Moebius and Sophia Prinz (eds.), Das Design der Gesellschaft: Zur Kulturanthropologie des Designs (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012); Elizabeth Grierson, Harriet Edquist, and Hélène Frichot (eds.), De-Signing Design (London, New York, et al.: Lexington Books, 2015).
11.
Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977), 1.
12.
Ibid., xi–xii. The term ‘unconscious’ is used by Sigmund Freud to characterize the reservoir of thoughts, emotions, desires, and recollections that exist outside of conscious awareness. S. Freud, “An Outline of Psychoanalysis,” 1938, in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (London et al.: Penguin, 2006), 1–63; 12–19.
13.
Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (2nd ed., Cambridge, UK et al.: Polity P, 2020), 90.
14.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review, 43: 1241–1299. See also Collins & Bilge, Intersectionality, 91; Nina Lykke, Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing (New York: Routledge, 2010), 78.
15.
Collins & Bilge, Intersectionality, 2.
16.
Ibid.
17.
Ibid., 46.
18.
Hannah Lauren Murray, Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021), 6.
19.
Isabel Soto, “Introduction,” A Place That Is Not a Place: Essays in Liminality and Text (Madrid: Gateway P, 2000), 7–16; 15.
20.
Niblett, World Literature, 3.
21.
Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (1984; Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), 33.
22.
Ibid., 32.
23.
Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (2004; London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 34.
24.
Ibid.; my emphasis.
25.
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2001), 26.
26.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (1982; Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1999), 3.
27.
Ibid.
28.
George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent I (Little, Brown, and Company: Boston, 1856–1874).
29.
Qtd. in Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York et al.: Routledge, 1993), 180.
30.
Ibid.
31.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893, in: George Rogers Taylor (ed.), The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History (Boston: D.C. Heath & Company, 1949), 1–18.
32.
Giles Gunn, Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1992), 10. For a discussion of the psychological concept of ‘the other’ and its relevance for cultural theory, see Stephen Frosh, “The Other,” American Imago, 59.4 (Winter 2002): 389–407.
33.
Attridge, Singularity, 34; emphasis in the original.
34.
Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (Durham: Duke UP, 2017), 16; emphases in the original. Cf. Collins & Bilge, Intersectionality, 167.
35.
Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 22.
36.
Ibid., 84. Iser here refers to the Bakhtinian concept of ‘dedifferentiation,’ which enables a convergence of self and other within the imaginary field of the text.
37.
Ibid.
38.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (1973; New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 3.
39.
W. Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976; Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1980), 22.
40.
Ibid., 125.
41.
Ibid., 107.
42.
Luhmann, Social Systems, 32.
43.
The term ‘autopoiesis’ was originally developed in biology to illustrate the self-maintaining nature of living cells, but is equally applied to social and cultural systems that create self-reflexive models of their own structure. Cf. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1972; Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980), 96–108.
44.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980; Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2005), 3.
45.
Ibid.
46.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 51.
47.
Gunn, Thinking, 30.
48.
“Design,” as defined by Oxford Dictionary, qtd. in Lorusso, https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/a-behavioral-definition-of-design/ (accessed 17 Sept. 2022). Another definition comes from Joseph Hudnut (the founder of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University), who describes design as the act of seizing an idea and transmuting it into a “visible pattern.” Qtd. in Jill Pearlman, Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus Legacy at Harvard (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2007), 58.
49.
“Design,” in Maurice Waite (ed.), Paperback Oxford English Dictionary (7th ed., Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 191.
50.
Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk),” in Fiona Hackne, Jonathan Glynne, and Viv Minto (eds.), Proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL-GB.pdf (accessed 20 May 2022), 1–13; 1, 9.
51.
Daniel Martin Feige, Design: Eine philosophische Analyse (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2018), 9. This citation and the following ones are my own translation.
52.
Ibid., 17. The design theorist Friedrich von Borries adds that design—as an “intervening, not simply descriptive” discipline—is at once at home in the world of art and the world of economy. As such, he maintains, design “forms the world which we live in.” F. von Borries, Weltentwerfen: eine politische Designtheorie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2017), 136; my translation.
53.
Borries, approaching the topic from a philosophical-political angle, uses the term Weltentwerfen to point to the acts of development and construction that are involved in all processes of creative design. Borries, Weltentwerfen, 9–36.
54.
In his thought-provoking article “De-Signing,” Hillel Schwartz points out that the word ‘design’ “has always been double-threaded, one strand woven through the visual and applied arts, another woven beneath the artfulness of projects visible or sensible (if ever) by degrees.” H. Schwartz, “De-Signing,” Critical Quarterly, 43.2 (July 2001): 55–65; 55.
55.
Wolfgang Welsch, Ästhetisches Denken (1990; Stuttgart: Reclam, 2017), 232; my translation.
56.
Grierson et al., De-Signing Design, xvii–xviii.
57.
The neologism ‘affordance’ was coined by perceptual psychologist J.J. Gibson to explain the function of objects in the environment of humans and animals. See J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1979), 127.
58.
Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (rev. and exp. ed., New York: Basic Books, 2013), 11.
59.
Levine, Forms, 9.
60.
Ibid.
61.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly (1852; London et al.: Penguin, 1986).
62.
Arthur Riss, “Racial Essentialism and Family Values in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Quarterly, 46.4 (Dec. 1994): 513–544, 516.
63.
Stephen J. DeCanio, “‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’: A Reappraisal,” The Centennial Review, 34.4 (Fall 1990): 587–593; 587. Cf. Thomas Graham, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Question of Race,” The New England Quarterly, 46 (Dec. 1973): 614–622.
64.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; London et al.: Penguin, 2003).
65.
See Stephen Railton, “Jim and Mark Twain: What Do Dey Stan’ For?” The Virginia Quarterly Review, 63.3 (Summer 1987): 393–408.
66.
E. Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (1935; London: Arrow Books, 2004), 15.
67.
Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Alan Gribben (Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2011).
68.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 4. Cf. Allen Carey-Webb, “Racism and Huckleberry Finn: Censorship, Dialogue, and Change,” English Journal, 82 (Nov. 1993): 22–33.
69.
See Winfried Fluck, Ästhetische Theorie und literaturwissenschaftliche Methode. Eine Untersuchung ihres Zusammenhangs am Beispiel der amerikanischen Huck Finn-Kritik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975).
70.
Feige, Design, 23–24; my translation. Cf. John Heskett, Design: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 3–5.
71.
For purposes of terminological convention, I am using ‘American’ in the sense of ‘U.S. American.’ For a discussion on the validity of the term ‘America’ in academic discourse, see Janice A. Radway, “What’s in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 20 November 1998,” American Quarterly, 51.1 (1999): 1–32.
72.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 2006), 187–206.
73.
Ibid., 211.
74.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786–1789,” The Journal of American History, 79.3 (Dec. 1992): 841–873; 843. Cf. Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” trans. Immanuel Wallerstein and Chris Turner, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 13 (Summer 1990): 329–361.
75.
Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 12–13; my emphasis.
76.
Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xv.
77.
Ibid., xi.
78.
Nigel Cross, Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work (London et al.: Bloomsbury, 2011), 3–4.
79.
Tim Brown, with Barry Katz, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 4.
80.
N. Cross, “Designerly Ways of Knowing,” Design Studies, 3.4 (Oct. 1982): 221–227; 226.
81.
Ibid.
82.
Norman, Design of Everyday Things, 20.
83.
Ibid., 22.
84.
William Cartwright, “Representing the City: Complementing Science and Technology with Art,” in Grierson et al. (eds.), De-Signing Design, 91–104.
85.
Cross, Design Thinking, 12.
86.
Brown, Change by Design, 241.
87.
Willemien Visser, “Designing as Construction of Representations: A Dynamic Viewpoint in Cognitive Design Research,” Human-Computer Interaction, 21.1 (2006): 103–152; 103.
88.
Designers often “tackle ‘ill-defined’ problems” in order to suggest possible ways of dealing with these challenges. Cross, “Designerly Ways,” 9. Here we can see a parallel to authors of socially critical texts who also identify the challenges of society in their works and offer the reader options of solving these problems that can be ‘tested’ in the safe space of literary fiction.
89.
Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xi.
90.
B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford et al.: Oxford UP, 2005), 44.
91.
Ibid., 70.
92.
Ibid., 237.
93.
B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993), 1–5.
94.
Ibid., 51; italics in the original.
95.
See Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 29.
96.
Ibid.
97.
Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xi.
98.
Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” trans. Immanuel Wallerstein, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 32.2 (2009) (special issue, Commemorating the Longue Durée): 171–209; 178.
99.
Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage: Sociological Essays and Journey (1980; New Brunswick et al.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 243.

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Department of American Studies, University of Graz, Graz, Styria, Austria
Stefan L. Brandt

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Brandt, S.L. (2022). Introduction: Welcome to the Twilight Zone. In: Moveable Designs, Liminal Aesthetics, and Cultural Production in America since 1772. Renewing the American Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13611-5_1

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13611-5_1
Published: 01 December 2022
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