Overview

"The United States of America-its politics, its culture, and its identity-is often framed as an evolving conversation about the nature of freedom. The word ""freedom"" is ubiquitous in political rhetoric, patriotic songs, advertising, and activism. Conflicts in American life typically revolve around questions of what it means to be free, who gets to be free, the limitations of freedom, and the problems and paradoxes associated with freedom. In the twenty-first century, in a time of social media, digital surveillance, climate change, pandemic management, autocratic politicians, and evolving attitudes about race, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity, the old question of what freedom truly entails calls for new answers, new ways of thinking, and even new ways of being free. In this time of crisis, it is imperative that democratic populations engage in earnest and open-ended discourse about what freedom means, how it is defined, and what it looks like. Figures of Freedom answers the call. This provocative and thought-provoking collection of essays by an international team of scholars invites readers to witness how recent literary, filmic, and televisual narratives have represented and reimagined themes of personal and political agency in the context of twenty-first-century aspirations and anxieties. In various ways, films as diverse as Bird Box, Toy Story, and Pacific Rim, television series such as Mad Men and Mr. Robot, and novels such as DeLillo's Zero K, Whitehead's Underground Railroad, and Millet's A Children's Bible all present characters who grapple with classical questions of freedom against a recognizably contemporary backdrop of terror, tyranny, technology, and apocalypse. Together, they reveal what twenty-first-century narratives can teach us about how the idea of freedom has been expanded, distorted, and reimagined in contemporary fiction."

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9780988392243

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Randy Laist, Ph.D., is a professor of English at the University of Bridgeport in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He is the author of Rethinking Writing Instruction in the Age of AI (2024), The Twin Towers in Film: A Cinematic History of the World Trade Center (2020), Cinema of Simulation: Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s (2015), and Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels (2009). He has also edited volumes of essays on college movies, plant studies, Indiana Jones, retro-representations of the 1980s, and inclusive educational design. He lives in New Haven with his wife, two kids, and Sigmund the cat. Brian A. Dixon, Ph.D., is a cultural studies scholar and media critic who serves as a professor of English at Goodwin University. His academic writings include studies concerning nineteenth-century American literature, detectives in film and fiction, ethnic humor in British sitcoms, archetypes in comic books, the works of Ian Fleming, and the James Bond films. He is the author of Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast: James Bond and the Body (2024). With writing partner Adam Chamberlain, Dixon has edited Columbia & Britannia: An Alternate History (2009), nominated for the 2010 Sidewise Award for Alternate History, as well as the acclaimed television retrospective Back to Frank Black: A Return to Chris Carter's Millennium (2012).

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