Daniel Shaviro

Bonfires of the American Dream in American Rhetoric, Literature and Film (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

How could American social solidarity have so collapsed that we cannot even cooperate in fighting a pandemic? One problem lies in how our values mutate and intersect in an era of runaway high-end inequality and evaporating upward mobility. Under such conditions, tensions rise between our egalitarian and democratic traditions on the one hand, and what we often call the "American Dream" of self-advancement and due reward on the other.

In our current Second Gilded Age, as in the first one from the late nineteenth century, the results of economic competition appear to suggest, falsely, that some of us are "winners" who deserve everything they have, while others are contemptible "losers." The rich ostensibly owe the poor nothing - not even compassion or respect, and certainly not material aid through government.

In Bonfires of the American Dream, Daniel Shaviro develops these themes through close studies, in social context, of such classic novels and films as Atlas Shrugged, The Great Gatsby, It's a Wonderful Life, and The Wolf of Wall Street. He thereby helps to provide a better understanding of what, apart from racism, has in recent years caused things to go so wrong culturally in America.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Anthem Press
• Seitenzahl: 250
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. Juni 2022
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781839983849
• Artikelnr.: 63388414

Autorenporträt

Daniel Shaviro, the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at NYU Law School, writes mainly about tax policy and inequality. Anthem Press published his well-regarded prior literary study, Literature and Inequality, in 2020.

Inhaltsangabe

CHAPTER 1 Introduction
CHAPTER 2 Winners and Losers in Russell Conwell's Acres of Diamonds Lecture and the John Galt Speech in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
CHAPTER 3 Pessimism for Optimists and Voyeurism for Pessimists in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
CHAPTER 4 Bailey Versus Belfort: Comparing It's a Wonderful Life and The Wolf of Wall Street
CHAPTER 5 Conclusion
Bibliography
Index 125