Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture
Michael T. Gilmore
Abstract
This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of American culture. Highlighting the American zeal for knowing or making legible, it seeks to recuperate a central tradition while simultaneously recognizing how the demand for clarity has obscured groups and perspectives at odds with the master narrative. American legibility has a long history stretching back to Puritan anti-monasticism; to the organization of the landscape into clearly delineated gridwork sections; and to the creation of a national government predicated on popular vigilance. The transparent imperative underlies this country’ ... More
This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of American culture. Highlighting the American zeal for knowing or making legible, it seeks to recuperate a central tradition while simultaneously recognizing how the demand for clarity has obscured groups and perspectives at odds with the master narrative. American legibility has a long history stretching back to Puritan anti-monasticism; to the organization of the landscape into clearly delineated gridwork sections; and to the creation of a national government predicated on popular vigilance. The transparent imperative underlies this country’s unmatched receptivity to motion pictures and to psychoanalysis: the first a technology of visual surfaces, the second a technique for plumbing interior depths. The book provides fresh readings of both classics and popular fictions as it traces the subject from the first White settlement in the New World to the end of the 20th century. It shows that American culture has always been consumed by an insatiable appetite — evident in politics, society, and literature — to explore the surface and depths and give them tangible form.
Keywords:
transparency,
literary classics,
popular fictions,
landscape,
cinema,
psychoanalysis,
Puritanism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2003 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195157765 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2007 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195157765.001.0001 |
