Friendship fictions
Subtitle: the rhetoric of citizenship in the liberal imaginary
By: Michael A. Kaplan
Series: Rhetoric, culture, and social critique
Publisher: University of Alabama Press; University Alabama Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Tuscaloosa
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780817316891; 9780817383510
Description: "A criticism often leveled at liberal democratic culture is its emphasis on the individual over community and private life over civic participation. However, liberal democratic culture has a more complicated relationship to notions of citizenship. As Michael Kaplan shows, citizenship comprises a major theme of popular entertainment, especially Hollywood film, and often takes the form of friendship narratives, and this is no accident. Examining the representations of citizenship-as-friendship in four Hollywood films (The Big Chill, Thelma & Louise, Lost in Translation, and Smoke), Kaplan argues that critics have misunderstood some of liberal democracy's most significant features: its resilience, its capacity for self-revision, and the cultural resonance of its model of citizenship." "For Kaplan, friendship - with its dynamic pacts, fluid alliances, and contingent communities - is one arena in which preconceptions about individual participation in civic life are contested and complicated. Friendship serves as a metaphor for citizenship and mirrors the individual's participation in civic life. Friendship Fictions unravels key implications of this metaphor and demonstrates how it can transform liberal culture into a more just and democratic way of life."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Imagining citizenship as friendship; title: friendship and the politics of community: The big chill; title: Friendship, rebel-citizenship, and the feminist critique of liberalism: Thelma & Louise; title: Liberalism, friendship, and the predicament of cybernetic sociality: Lost in translation; title: Race, friendship, and the speculative politics of infinite debt: Smoke; title: Conclusion: the friendship supplement and the rule of allegory.