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How could American social solidarity have so collapsed that we cannot even cooperate in fighting a pandemic? One problem lies in how our values mutate and intersect in an era of runaway high-end inequality and evaporating upward mobility. Under such conditions, the American Dream’s seeming to suggest, falsely, that those who succeed economically are “winners,” while the rest of us are “losers,” puts it in dire conflict with our traditions of democracy and egalitarianism. In Bonfires of the American Dream, through close cultural studies of classic novels and films – Atlas Shrugged, The Great Gatsby, It’s a Wonderful Life, and The Wolf of Wall Street – Daniel Shaviro helps to provide a better understanding of what went wrong culturally in America.
“This is a wonderful book, a page-turner about popular American thinking about the American Dream. Shaviro shows how much of our cultural experience consists of economic fantasies, and how much in turn those fantasies shape our culture and our politics. Brilliant, accurate, surprising, and unfailingly interesting.” — William Flesch, Professor of English, Brandeis University, USA.
CHAPTER 1 Introduction; CHAPTER 2 Winners and Losers in Russell Conwell’s Acres of Diamonds Lecture and the John Galt Speech in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged; CHAPTER 3 Pessimism for Optimists and Voyeurism for Pessimists in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; CHAPTER 4 Bailey Versus Belfort: Comparing It’s a Wonderful Life and The Wolf of Wall Street; CHAPTER 5 Conclusion; Bibliography; Index 125