Critical ruptures: Violence and the legacy of American exceptionalism from the Cold War to 9/11.

摘要

Critical Ruptures: Violence and the Legacy of American Exceptionalism from the Cold War to 9/11 examines the deployment of violence as a means of shaping human artifice within the context of American politics of exceptionalism. The project argues that the grand narrative of American exceptionalism, as perpetuated by what Donald Pease refers to as "state fantasy" work, is an extension of the basic human need to shape reality in a way that alleviates ontological insecurity. It specifically interrogates the way the legacy of exceptionalism has shaped American politics and history from the onset of the Cold War to the aftermath of 9/11 and the representation of moments at which the violence of an exceptionalist model of nation building can be drawn into question. The era between the onset of the Cold War and the aftermath 9/11 is unique in terms of the state fantasy's level of visibility and the frequency with which Americans are provided with potential moments of rupture. Critical ruptures, which provide an opportunity for one to reconsider her/his perception of the ways in which humans shape reality, occur largely at moments where various forms of violence intersect and reveal the hollow nature of discourse that seeks to justify violence as a means of imposing meaning on nothingness.;Providing close readings of how Americans are shaped by state fantasy work and how they react when that fantasy is drawn into question in American film and literature from 1953 to 2007, such as Robert Coover's The Public Burning, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Don DeLillo's Falling Man, I suggest that the manner in which authors attempt to map critical ruptures is essential to our understanding of how we proceed from the threshold of rupture to the full deployment of what Anthony Bogues refers to as the "radical imagination." I conclude that the nearly infinite potentialities revealed by a moment of critical rupture will be central to rethinking the relationship between nation and ontology as we moved forward in the twenty-first century.