Americans love road trips. They love to go on road trips. They love to read about road trips. They love to watch road trip stories unfold on television and film. Road trip stories are a consistent feature of the American landscape, a central part of American mythology, and an important piece of the American dream. In The American Road Trip and American Political Thought, Susan McWilliams argues that the American fascination with road trip stories is about more than mere escapism or wanderlust. She shows, in walking through stories like On the Road and The Grapes of Wrath, that American road trip stories are a key expression of American political thought. They are not just stories of personal journeys. They are stories of the American nation. McWilliams Barndt shows how Americans have long used road trip stories to raise and explore central questions about American politics in theory and practice. They talk about freedom and equality and diversity and take those vaunted American ideals for a test drive. American road trip stories are where the rubber meets the road in American political thought. The American Road Trip and American Political Thought includes explorations of a wide variety of American authors, from Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau to Erika Lopez and Cheryl Strayed, from Mark Twain and John Steinbeck to Solomon Northup and Hunter S. Thompson. It covers topics including gender, labor, place, race, and technology in American political life. This is a book that will change the way you think about the great American road trip and the great American story.

Short Stories and Political Philosophy: Power, Prose, and Persuasion explores the relationship between fictional short stories and the classic works of political philosophy. This edited volume addresses the innovative ways that short stories grapple with the same complex political and moral questions, concerns, and problems studied in the fields of political philosophy and ethics. The volume is designed to highlight the ways in which short stories may be used as an access point for the challenging works of political philosophy encountered in higher education. Each chapter analyzes a single story through the lens of thinkers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Max Weber and Hannah Arendt. The contributors to this volume do not adhere to a single theme or intellectual tradition. Rather, this volume is a celebration of the intellectual and literary diversity available to students and teachers of political philosophy. It is a resource for scholars as well as educators who seek to incorporate short stories into their teaching practice.

The purpose of this volume is to discuss the concept of citizenship—in terms of its origins, its meanings, and its contemporary place and relevance in American democracy, and within a global context. The authors in this collection wrestle with the connection of citizenship to major tensions between liberty and equality, dynamism and stability, and civic disagreement and social cohesion. The essays also raise fundamental questions about the relationship between citizenship and leadership, and invite further reflection on the features of citizenship and civic leadership under the American Constitution. Finally, this collection offers various suggestions about how to revitalize citizenship and civic leadership through an education that is conducive to a renewal of American civic practices and institutions.

This volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel.

The strange and wonderful place of Twin Peaks captivated audiences for more than two decades before its long-awaited return to television in 2017. David Lynch and Mark Frost created a land that embodies the politics of American culture. With its focus on small-town America and life outside urban centers, rural and suburban values play a big part in the overall Twin Peaks narrative. More than just a soapy murder investigation or a mysterious puzzle to be solved, Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return are metaphors for the political years in which they are set. The Politics of Twin Peaks investigates the show’s engagement with American politics and identity. With a close relationship between the two, Twin Peaks is the rare cultural landmark in both film and television whose timelessness is defined by the fact that it can constantly be reinterpreted. Within that sometimes dreamlike Lynchian narrative, Twin Peaks hints at, sometimes explicitly and sometimes subtly, the political fault lines in the United States. In this edited collection, the politics inherent in Twin Peaks is approached from numerous points of view.

This book offers the first sustained argument against the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and his readings of Charles Baudelaire. More broadly, it is also a critique of politicized aesthetics and cultural Marxism, of which Benjamin is a pioneering and emblematic figure. Cristaudo and Beibei argue that Baudelaire was not mistaken in refusing to subject aesthetics to morality and politics. Baudelaire’s refusal was based on the recognition that existential matters, such as sickness, evil, death, sexual longing, melancholy, and beauty itself—all themes at the center of his poetry—are by nature intrinsically supra-political. By contrast, Benjamin’s faith in political redemption, while breaking with the enlightenment’s faith in progress, nevertheless conforms to another core element of faith of the enlightenment, via faith in the ability of morals and politics to liberate humanity. The authors make the case that Benjamin’s understanding of politics is severely deficient because it is not sufficiently versed in an understanding of economics or the nature of class interests, and that Marx’s own theory of economics is fundamentally deficient and creates an insurmountable problem for those deferring to a future industrial society free from capitalism.

This volume brings together reflections on the relationship between politics and storytelling, especially within the democratic context. Examples are drawn from the ancient and modern worlds, from classical Greek tragedy and Shakespeare to television, science fiction, and comic books, in order to examine the relationship between the philosophical and the poetical. As a political phenomenon, storytelling is used to confirm the prejudices and uphold the principles that prevail within the culture that produces it, while also providing a means for sparking a criticism of that culture from within. What role should literature play in educating a population, especially as regards one’s civic responsibilities and relationship to the political regime, and how does it compete with or complement rational inquiry in providing that education? What observable effects does storytelling in fact tend to have, especially among democratic peoples, and what effects does it have on their political identities, viewpoints, commitments, and behavior? Which passions does it stoke: our hopes or our fears, our suspicions or our loyalties? Can storytelling in democratic times offer resistance to the logic and momentum of democratization or does it only reliably propel it further forward? Does democratic literature only cater to the satisfaction of personal appetites or can it ennoble people so that they are more apt to fulfill their responsibilities to each other as moral agents and fellow citizens? This volume takes diverse approaches to addressing questions like these.