'Them as feel the need to be free': reworking the frontier myth
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[1] Pennsylvania State University
Pennsylvania State University
Borough of State College, Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Southern communication journal, ISSN 1041-794X, Vol. 76, nº 3, 2011, págs. 230-247
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
The frontier myth, first identified by Frederick Jackson Turner over 100 years ago, defines U.S. American national identity. Through its many articulations, the frontier has relied on two dialectics, the savage-civil and the individual-communal, to move into new spaces to renew national unity. I contend that the television series Firefly demonstrates a new constitutive element for the frontier, substituting the political for the spatial. Politically, the story and aesthetics maximize upon the liminal space between the savage and the civil, the individual and the communal, and the nostalgic western and forward-looking science fiction. The frontier provided renews the frontier myth, realizing its unifying telos, by both constituting and reworking the dialectics.
