Friendship Fictions: The Rhetoric of Citizenship in the Liberal Imaginary (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780817359386)

Friendship serves as a metaphor for citizenship and mirrors the individual's participation in civic life. Friendship Fictions unravels key implications of this metaphor and demonstrates how it can transform liberal culture into a more just and democratic way of life.

A criticism often leveled at liberal democratic culture is its emphasis on the individual over community and private life over civic participation. However, liberal democratic culture has a more complicated relationship to notions of citizenship. As Michael Kaplan shows, citizenship comprises a major theme of popular entertainment, especially Hollywood film, and often takes the form of friendship narratives; and this is no accident. Examining the representations of citizenship-as-friendship in four Hollywood films (The Big Chill, Thelma & Louise, Lost in Translation, and Smoke), Kaplan argues that critics have misunderstood some of liberal democracy's most significant features: its resilience, its capacity for self-revision, and the cultural resonance of its model of citizenship. For Kaplan, friendship--with its dynamic pacts, fluid alliances, and contingent communities--is one arena in which preconceptions about individual participation in civic life are contested and complicated. Friendship serves as a metaphor for citizenship and mirrors the individual's participation in civic life. Friendship Fictions unravels key implications of this metaphor and demonstrates how it can transform liberal culture into a more just and democratic way of life.

Author: Michael A. Kaplan
ISBN-10: 0817359389
ISBN-13: 9780817359386
Publisher: University Alabama Press
Language: English
Published: 12/11/2018
Pages: 268
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.80d