Overview

Suburban Dreams: Imagining and Building the Good Life explores how the suburban imaginary, composed of the built environment and imaginative texts, functions as a resource for living out the “good life.” Starting with the premise that suburban films, residential neighbourhoods, chain restaurants, malls, and megachurches are compelling forms (topos) that shape and materialize the everyday lives of residents and visitors, Greg Dickinson’s Suburban Dreams offers a rhetorically attuned critical analysis of contemporary American suburbs and the “good life” their residents pursue. Dickinson’s analysis suggests that the good life is rooted in memory and locality, both of which are foundations for creating a sense of safety central to the success of suburbs. His argument is situated first in a discussion of the intersections among buildings, cities, and the good life and the challenges to these relationships wrought by the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. The argument then turns to rich, fully-embodied analyses of suburban films and a series of archetypal suburban landscapes to explore how memory, locality, and safety interact in constructing the suburban imaginary. Moving from the pastoralism of residential neighbourhoods and chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Macaroni Grill, through the megachurch’s veneration of suburban malls to the lifestyle center’s nostalgic invocation of urban downtowns, Dickinson complicates traditional understandings of the ways suburbs situate residents and visitors in time and place. The analysis suggests that the suburban good life is devoted to family. Framed by the discourses of consumer culture, the suburbs often privi­lege walls and roots to an expansive vision of worldliness. At the same time, developments such as farmers markets suggest a continued striving by suburbanites to form relationships in a richer, more organic fashion. Dickinson’s work eschews casually dismissive attitudes toward the suburbs and the pursuit of the good life. Rather, he succeeds in show­ing how by identifying the positive rhetorical resources the suburbs supply, it is in fact possible to engage with the suburbs intentionally, thoughtfully, and rigorously. Beyond an analysis of the suburban imagi­nary, Suburban Dreams demonstrates how a critical engagement with everyday places can enrich daily life. The book provides much of inter­est to students and scholars of rhetoric, communication studies, public memory, American studies, architecture, and urban planning.

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9780817318635

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Greg Dickinson has for some time been on the leading edge of research into the communicative and rhetorical dimensions of space and place. This book extends that important program of research by considering American suburbia, a long-standing target of scorn and dismissal. Dickinson skillfully analyzes how suburbia serves as a locus of desire, motivation, and affiliation by its detractorsHe is able to place the suburb at or near the center of American popular culture, and his work will demand fresh attention to that space/place. This book will be of interest to scholars in rhetoric, communication studies, geography, American studies, architecture, and farflung students of the city. Barry S. Brummett, author of Rhetoric in Popular Culture, Techniques of Close Reading, and Rhetorical Homologies: Form, Culture, Experience

Greg Dickinson has for some time been on the leading edge of research into the communicative and rhetorical dimensions of space and place. This book extends that important program of research by considering American suburbia, a long-standing target of scorn and dismissal. Dickinson skillfully analyzes how suburbia serves as a locus of desire, motivation, and affiliation by its detractorsHe is able to place the suburb at or near the center of American popular culture, and his work will demand fresh attention to that space/place. This book will be of interest to scholars in rhetoric, communication studies, geography, American studies, architecture, and farflung students of the city. --Barry S. Brummett, author of <i>Rhetoric in Popular Culture</i>, <i>Techniques of Close Reading</i>, and <i>Rhetorical Homologies: Form, Culture, Experience</i>

Greg Dickinson has for some time been on the leading edge of research into the communicative and rhetorical dimensions of space and place. This book extends that important program of research by considering American suburbia, a long-standing target of scorn and dismissal. Dickinson skillfully analyzes how suburbia serves as a locus of desire, motivation, and affiliation by its detractorsHe is able to place the suburb at or near the center of American popular culture, and his work will demand fresh attention to that space/place. This book will be of interest to scholars in rhetoric, communication studies, geography, American studies, architecture, and farflung students of the city. --Barry S. Brummett, author of Rhetoric in Popular Culture, Techniques of Close Reading, and Rhetorical Homologies: Form, Culture, Experience

Greg Dickinson has for some time been on the leading edge of research into the communicative and rhetorical dimensions of space and place. This book extends that important program of research by considering American suburbia, a long-standing target of scorn and dismissal. Dickinson skillfully analyzes how suburbia serves as a locus of desire, motivation, and affiliation by its detractorsHe is able to place the suburb at or near the center of American popular culture, and his work will demand fresh attention to that space/place. This book will be of interest to scholars in rhetoric, communication studies, geography, American studies, architecture, and farflung students of the city. Barry S. Brummett, author of <i>Rhetoric in Popular Culture</i>, <i>Techniques of Close Reading</i>, and <i>Rhetorical Homologies: Form, Culture, Experience</i>

Author Information

Greg Dickinson is a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University and coeditor of Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials. In 1995 he received the Gerald R. Miller Disser­tation Award from the National Communication Association and in 2012 received the NCA’s Golden Anniversary Monograph Award.

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