Ideological Adaptation in the American Century

• Author / Creator

  Rangwala, Shama

• The texts under analysis in this project narrativize the tension between individual agency and the systemic limits that structure the American nation, particularly focusing on the entanglements of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. It takes a cultural studies perspective to interrogate the representation of the American nation through its iterations in narratives of the exceptional subject, figures manifested in characters who embody American sovereignty and the promise of freedom—in other words, characters whose narrative trajectories test the limits of these ideals. Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) foregrounds the relationship of feminized labour and the image within a social realm of inequitable market relations; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby (1925) punctures the American Dream by showing the limits of “greatness” for even such a deliberately exceptional figure such as Gatsby; Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927) puts forth socialist values only to contain them through a narrative that reinforces the brutal systemic triumph of capitalism; and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) imagines the unbounded desire of the transcendent character Janie. In what I identify as ideological adaptation—both in terms of adaptations whose choices are necessarily ideological and the adaptation of ideology itself—the filmic 21st-century iterations of these literary texts exploring the American sovereign subject in the cultural imaginary provide case studies for examining the multifarious ways that national mythologies are adapted to new formal and historical contexts. My analysis interrogates the complex ways that adaptations illuminate how the ideologies that sustain the American nation are themselves adaptable and adapting through their repeated representations in the cultural imaginary.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • cultural studies
  • adaptation studies
  • American studies

• Graduation date

  Spring 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-kafe-be95

• License

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