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Cargando... The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online (Studies in American Thought and Culture)por Jeff Smith
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In such popular television series as ""The West Wing"" and ""24"", in thrillers like Tom Clancy's novels, and in recent films, plays, graphic novels, and internet cartoons, America has been led by an amazing variety of chief executives. Some of these are real presidents who have been fictionally reimagined. Others are 'might-have-beens' like Philip Roth's President Charles Lindbergh. Many more have never existed except in some storyteller's mind. In ""The Presidents We Imagine"", Jeff Smith examines the presidency's ever-changing place in the American imagination. Ranging across different media and analyzing works of many kinds, some familiar and some never before studied, he explores the evolution of presidential fictions, their central themes, the impact on them of new and emerging media, and their largely unexamined role in the nation's real politics. Smith traces fictions of the presidency from the plays and polemics of the eighteenth century - when the new office was born in what Alexander Hamilton called 'the regions of fiction' - to the digital products of the twenty-first century, with their seemingly limitless user-defined ways of imagining the world's most important political figure. Students of American culture and politics, as well as readers interested in political fiction and film, will find here a colorful, indispensable guide to the many surprising ways Americans have been 'representing' presidents even as those presidents have represented them. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Smith begins by analyzing one of the key models for the presidency: the “Patriot King”, an executive who “would rule above party, revive the forgotten spirit of the constitution, and make ‘public virtue and real capacity’ once again the basis of political power.”(16) This ideal, along with those drawn from the history of the Roman Republic, served to inform the thinking of the delegates who drafted the Constitution that created the office. For the first century of the nation’s existence, the image of the presidency was closely tied to the men who actually held the office – most notably George Washington, but also Andrew Jackson and later Abraham Lincoln. By the end of the 19th century, however, fictional presidents began appearing in print and on stage, allowing writers to define and redefine the presidency in very different ways. By the middle of the 20th century, the fictional depictions of the presidency had expanded to the screen as well, often serving as a Rorschach test of the issues and anxieties of the age. Smith concludes with a chapter that looks at how this dynamic between the presidency and our expectations of this played out on September 11, 2001, a reflection of how “the realities to be represented or fictively manipulated are, themselves, already permeated by fictions.”(287)
Insightful and informative, Smith’s book is an enlightening look at the evolving image of the American presidency in the national imagination. His analysis of the books, plays, films, and television shows is perceptive and nicely tied to the times in which they were created. Yet his text is pockmarked with factual errors which, while minor, raise doubts as to just how closely he examined the works he analyzes, while the inclusion of some works (such as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, a landmark film about American politics but one in which the presidency is absent) seem a poor use of limited space. Overall, though, the strengths of Smith’s work outweigh its weaknesses; this is a good book for anyone interested in understanding how Americans have viewed the presidency and how these views have helped shape the institution. ( )