Literary and Filmic Engage- Ments with American Suburbia, 1990-2017
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ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output The poetics of sprawl: literary and filmic engage- ments with American suburbia, 1990-2017 https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40418/ Version: Citation: Eldridge, Pippa (2019) The poetics of sprawl: literary and filmic engagements with American suburbia, 1990-2017. [Thesis] (Un- published) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email The Poetics of Sprawl: Literary and Filmic Engagements with American Suburbia, 1990-2017 Pippa Eldridge Thesis for the degree of PhD in English Birkbeck, University of London, 2019 1 Signed Declaration I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Pippa Eldridge 30th January 2019 2 Abstract Analysing fiction and film produced between 1990 and 2017, this thesis traces a loosening of American suburbia’s narrow socio-cultural and geographical co- ordinates, and maps the emergence of sprawl as a material landscape and social, psychic and cultural condition. Uncomfortable truths about enduring ‘national’ values of individualism and frontier heroism permeate my work. However, its justification lies not in exposing geopolitical or historical flaws, but in demonstrating that the erosion of hegemonic narratives linked to suburbia has galvanised a multifarious reconceptualisation of suburban space. This project unpacks sprawl’s connotations as a loosely-definable material condition that conjures homogenisation and diversification, growth and implosion, rupture and continuity, and considers the implications of, and possibilities created by, its reconfiguration. It challenges dystopian projections of suburbia – advanced by post-war social studies and erroneously mapped onto fiction by leading cultural critics – and illuminates fictional landscapes of dense socio-political networks. Articulating a poetics of sprawl foregrounds suburbia as a culturally- significant site, whilst opening its literature and film to more complex geographies and critical frameworks. Chapter one plots suburbia’s material and socio-political evolution from 1945- present. It analyses the conjunctures that created debilitating associations of suburbia with stasis, and justifies revisionist readings of twentieth-century suburban fictions. Chapter two interrogates crises of suburban place identification in the 1990s, and argues that parodic texts by Wells Tower and A.M. Homes problematise binaristic models of coercion or collapse. Chapter three tackles the ethical corollaries of invoking a poetics of sprawl. It explores Danielle Dutton and Karen Tei Yamashita’s renegotiation of local and global interdependencies, and scrutinises their attempts to embrace flexible, less neoliberal, models of identity and community. Chapter four examines film and the urban ‘core’ around which suburbia is physically and imaginatively structured. It maintains that twenty-first-century horror – long thought to validate white anti-urbanism – increasingly confronts the causes of post- metropolitan decline. 3 Contents Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 I. ‘None of this is set in concrete’ 7 II. Physical, Symbolic, Embodied 12 III. Accommodating the Ex-Centric 16 IV. Methodology: 18 i. Timeframe 20 ii. Loci 23 iii. Fictions and Films 27 V. The Poetics of Sprawl 29 VI. Structure 32 1. Navigating the Binaries: Reappraising the Construction of American Suburbia 37 I. Suburban Histories, 1925-1960 40 II. Suburban Social Studies, 1950-1963 48 III. A New Breed of Social Scientist, 1960-1970 53 IV. Suburbia’s Fate: Sprawl, New Urbanism, Gated Communities, 1990-Present 61 V. Revisionist Readings of Suburban Fictions, 1961 and 1985 70 VI. Literary Criticism and the ‘Suburbanisation’ of 1990s American Fiction 77 Conclusion 85 2. Rupturing the ‘Total Interior:’ The Violent Restructuring of Inherited Paradigms 86 2.1. Progress and Devolution in Wells Tower’s ‘Raw Water’ (2010) 91 I. The Degenerate Utopia 94 II. The Causal Power of Space 97 III. Deconstructing the Dystopia 102 2.2. Desecrating the Suburban Home in A.M. Homes’ Music for Torching (1999) 107 I. Home is Where the Hurt Is 109 II. Failing to Reproduce Normativity 112 III. A House is Not a Home: Negotiating the Fissure 118 IV. Letting the Symbol Murder the Thing 124 V. The Limited Utopia and the Novel Alternative 135 Conclusion 142 3. De- and Re-Territorialisation: Considering a Poetics of Sprawl 146 3.1. Anxieties of Influence in Danielle Dutton’s SPRAWL (2010) 151 I. A ‘Triumphant’ Poetics of the Everyday 154 II. A Distinctly Suburban SPRAWL 159 III. ‘A sick and moody privacy’ 168 IV. The Politics of the Poetics of SPRAWL 173 3.2. Transnational Politics and Aesthetics in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) 180 I. ‘Polycentric, polarised, polyglot:’ Los Angeles as Thirdspace 183 II. The HyperContexts of Tropic of Orange 187 4 III. Global Oppressions, Grassroots Resistance 189 IV. Metafictional Interrogations 196 Conclusion 200 4. Seeping Beyond the Core: Post-Metropolitan Horror in Twenty-First- Century Detroit 202 4.1. Context 207 I. The Production of Detroit from the Suburban Side-Lines 207 II. Human Ruins: Anti-Urbanism on the Big Screen 211 III. A Landscape Without Figures: ‘Ruin Porn’ and Aesthetic Depopulation 216 4.2. Recent Filmic Interventions 220 I. Illuminating the Sacrifice Zone in Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe (2016) 220 II. Stalked by Precarity: Suburban Guilt and Post-Metropolitan Permeability in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2015) 232 III. White Alienation and Vampirical Gentrification in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2014) 244 Conclusion 252 Conclusion: Jonathan Franzen and Literary Gentrification 256 Bibliography 262 5 Acknowledgments I am indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and to the School of Arts at Birkbeck for awarding me the studentship that made this thesis possible. Most of all, I am immensely grateful to my supervisor, Anna Hartnell, whose support, wisdom and insight has been immeasurable, and whose enthusiasm has made working on this project so consistently rewarding. I would also like to thank Joseph Brooker and Heike Bauer, who offered shrewd and welcome advice as the thesis began to take shape. Thanks to Anna, Joe, and the generosity of the Centre for Contemporary Literature, I had the opportunity to organise Action Writing: The Politics of U.S. Literature, a conference that introduced me to many inspiring academics in my field. I am appreciative of everyone who took part, especially keynote speakers Martin Eve and Michael Hrebeniak. Working alongside Catherine Flay, Alex Williamson and David Miller at this and several other events was a lot of fun. I am also sincerely grateful to Wai Chee Dimock at Yale University for supporting an instrumental research trip to the U.S. in 2015. I feel extremely lucky to have a network of wonderful friends who’ve been willing to challenge, reassure and laugh with (and at) me along the way. Extra special thanks are due to Kat Harris, Susie Christensen, Jack Mooney, Seb Jenner, Simon Vickery, James Spinney, Beth Williams, Phil Longman and Zoe Robinson. Zoe is part of my second family at Daunt Books, whose staff have welcomed me back into the fold several times over the years. Thank you all for sharing book recommendations, endless cups of coffee and entertaining anecdotes. Thanks, also, to Allan Siddick, a bookshop customer who has become a kind friend. To my lovely housemate, Bryony Long, you’ve always made it such a pleasure to come home in the evening. And to Jack O’Connor, thanks for bringing the sun to the final few months. There is no way I could have done any of it without six incredible women who I’ve had the privilege of knowing for almost half my life – Freya McLeavy, Ruth Kidman, Leana Crookes, Anne Johnson, Anna Dixie and Kate Cunningham-Dunbar. You’ve held me up and kept me together. Finally, my greatest debt of gratitude is to my family, for their love and encouragement. To my brother, Jonathan, for his patience and good humour on the occasions when I came home only to chain myself to my computer. To my wonderful dad, Jeremy, whose eagerness to tell people that there was a ‘Doctor’ in the family kept me typing. And to my mum, Lynn Bushell – an extraordinary, courageous and creative person, a compassionate parent and a discerning reader – I owe everything. It’s to her, with all the love I have, that I dedicate this thesis. 6 Introduction I. ‘None of this is set in concrete’ In 1989 – just four decades after William Levitt founded America’s first mass- produced suburb – the Smithsonian Institution of American History launched a bid to secure an entire Levittown house to display in its Washington museum. ‘Although none of this is set in concrete,’ declared curator Bill Yeingst, injecting a touch of whimsy into the unprecedented proposal, ‘the Levittown house would be dismantled at the site, transported to Washington and reconstructed.’ There, divested of its inhabitants, it would continue to ‘play out the stories of America. Stories important to everyone.’1 That the archetypal suburb, seemingly epitomised by the cookie-cutter housing of 1950s Levittown, has played a crucial role in the cultural construction of America, is central to my enquiry. Variously portrayed as the physical embodiment of the American Dream, a totalitarian machine producing conformity, a Thoreauvian retreat and a consumer hub,