Main-street modernity: U.S. narratives of nationalism, imperialism, and exceptionalism

The American small town is a national icon that widely circulates in literary, cultural, and political discourses as an "authentic" American space and signifier. However, despite its iconicity, there are surprisingly few studies that analyze the small town's ideological centrality to the U.S.'s identity and imagination. Main-Street Modernity: U.S. Narratives of Nationalism, Imperialism, and Exceptionalism addresses this critical need and argues that the small town is not a nostalgic relic from the past. Rather, the project argues that the small town is a literary and national form that is reinvented when modernity becomes recognized as a global modernity and the U.S. becomes recognized as a global empire. The project brings together a diverse range of literary, cultural and political texts---including Thornton Wilder's Our Town; Peter Weir's The Truman Show; and Ronald Reagan's use of Dixon, Illinois---to study how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century. By identifying and analyzing the small town as a form rather than a real, material place, the project studies how the dominant small town is used to structure narratives and knowledge regimes that become coded as national narratives and national knowledge regimes. What is at stake, I demonstrate, is that the dominant small is central to the project of U.S. nationalism and to the project of U.S. imperialism.;Although the small town has become a (national) commonsense signifier, my project turns the small town into a question. What makes a space legible as a small town? What is at stake in the question of the small town's legibility is the question of the nation's legibility. Main-Street Modernity traces the long ideological history that couples the small town and the nation, and foregrounds the centrality of U.S. literary production and canonization in the formation of this national icon. The project delineates, historicizes, and analyzes a complex small-town genre that ranges from Mark Twain's figuring of Hannibal, Missouri to Toni Morrison's figuring of the Bottom in Sula. Moreover, the project tracks this literary-national form across a variety of non-literary discourses including speeches by presidential candidates from William McKinley to Barack Obama; sociological studies such as Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown; and popular travelogues such as John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley: In Search of America. At the conclusion, I consider how this ideological small town is made "real" by analyzing popular architectural movements such as New Urbanism that resulted in Disney's Celebration, Florida, as well as the redesigned U.S. military bases in Belvoir, Virginia and Balad, Iraq. The project studies how the small town underwrites U.S. exceptionalism, and the project contends that our global modernity can be ideologically understood as a main-street modernity.