American Dream

The Open Road and the Traffic Stop

by Nancy Leong

64 Florida Law Rev. ____ (forthcoming 2012)

American culture is steeped in the mythology of the open road. In our collective imagination, the road represents... more American culture is steeped in the mythology of the open road. In our collective imagination, the road represents freedom, escape, friendship, romance, and above all, the possibility for a better life. But our shared dream of the open road comes to a halt in the mundane reality of the traffic stop - a judicially-authorized policing procedure in which an officer may pull over a vehicle if she has cause to believe the driver has committed even the most minor traffic violation. This paper examines the cultural texts - books, movies, songs - celebrating the open road and juxtaposes them against those documenting the traffic stop. The traffic stop, I conclude, interrupts the open road narrative closely associated with the American dream. Those stopped most frequently - in particular, racial minorities - are consequently denied full participation in an abiding national fantasy.

The enduring myth of the American Dream: Mobility,marginalization, and hope

by Heather Wyatt-Nichol

(2011) International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, 14(2):258-279.

The American Dream functions as a myth within our political
discourse by providing hope to citizens and... more The American Dream functions as a myth within our political
discourse by providing hope to citizens and reinforcing beliefs in the protestant work ethic and meritocracy. This article examines the myth through categories of mobility, marginalization, and hope. Elite theory and institutional isomorphism are used to explore business privilege within Public Administration. The ability to reframe the American Dream is considered through an examination of select speeches at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Despite evidence of declining mobility and structural inequality, citizens cling to the myth. One explanation is that
marginalization perpetuates the American Dream by crowding out issues of social class through various methods of institutional isomorphism. Another explanation is that the dream endures because it can be re-conceptualized.

Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust: A Metonymy of Modernist Anxiety In America

by Viken Tufenkjian

Nathanael West’s The Day of Locust depicts the microcosm of 1930s Hollywood, which by that decade had already been... more Nathanael West’s The Day of Locust depicts the microcosm of 1930s Hollywood, which by that decade had already been firmly installed as an American cultural paradigm. In the years stamped by the sobering disillusionment ensuing from the Great Depression, Hollywood had become the ultimate American success story. The “vehicles” of ubiquitous movie stars and their iconic representations in the popular media signalled to audiences the surviving viability of the American dream. West’s novel is a modernist album of the mass-produced, insipid images the Hollywood community, recruited in the service of perpetuating the commerce of American phantasms. At the same time, The Day of the Locust illustrates the progressively degenerative course of despair the Hollywood fantasy instantiates for its subscribers, rendering that progression in the modernist modalities of the image-culture that is its setting. Through a close reading of the novel, I submit that the shared distress of its characters operates in a modernist framework informed by the dialectics of twentieth-century American culture, which breeds the proliferation of desolate individuals.

Sympathy for the Devil? Reconsidering the Legend of Raoul Duke on the 40th Anniversary of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

by Rory Feehan

published in Beatdom #9 - available to purchase on Amazon

Othering the Self: Dissonant Visual Culture and Quotidian Trauma in United States Suburbia

by Ted Gournelos