Friendship Fictions: The Rhetoric of Citizenship in the Liberal Imaginary

By Michael A. Kaplan

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0817316892
• ISBN13: 9780817316891
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.0"