The Promise of Nostalgia analyses a range of texts - including The Virgin Suicides, both the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides' and Sofia Coppola's screen adaptation, photography of Detroit's 'abandoned spaces', and blogger Tavi Gevinson's media output - to explore nostalgia as a prominent affect in contemporary American cultural production.
Counter to the prevalent caricature of nostalgia as anti-future, the book proposes a more nuanced reading of its stakes and meanings. Instead of understanding it as evidence of the absence of utopia it contends that there is a masked utopian impulse in this nostalgia 'mode' and critical potential in what has typically been dismissed as ideological.
This book will be of interest to scholars, graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students interested in contemporary culture, cultural theory, media studies, the Frankfurt School, utopian studies and American literature and culture.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgments
Personal Preface
Introduction
PART ONE
1 Nostalgia: Is It Really Not What It Used To Be?
2 Memory, Nostalgia, Utopia and Time
3 Nostalgia as 'Gold-bearing Rubble'
PART TWO
Interlude 1 The Hole in the Whole: Utopia Contra Instrumental Reason
4 The 'Strange Magic' of Style Rookie and Rookiemag
Interlude 2 A Space Outside: Utopia as Negation
5 Memories of Longing in The Virgin Suicides
Interlude 3 Marshalling the Past: Utopia versus Once Upon a Time
6 Nostalgia in Photographs of Detroit's 'Abandoned Spaces'
Conclusion
Bibliography
