Abstract
This paper will contend that what Frederic Jameson calls ‘the immense Utopian appeal of Nationalism’ derives from Nationalism’s functional structure, established in what Jameson describes as the text’s ‘unconscious’, where ideologies and myth interact.1 It thereby constitutes a structural mechanism effecting a repression of history in a duplicit process of revelation and concealment. This process, I believe, operates with an almost emblematic potency in the United States.
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Notes
Jameson, Frederick, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981) p. 298.
Barthes, Roland, ‘Myth Today’, Mythologies (1957), trans. A. Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972) pp. 116, 124.
Levi-Strauss, C., ‘Response a quelques questions’, Esprit, November 1963, pp. 628–53;
Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1958), rpt., trans. C. Jacobsen and B. G. Schoepf (London: Allen Lane, 1968) p. 209;
see also Paul Ricoeur, ‘Structure et hermeneutique’, Esprit, November 1963, pp. 596–62
and Edmund Leach’s summary in his Levi-Strauss (London: Collins, 1970) pp. 16–17.
Wolf, Bryan Jay, Romantic Revision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth Century American Painting and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 91.
Cole, Thomas, ‘Essay on American Scenery’, 1835, rpt. in John W. McCoubrey (ed.), American Art 1700–1960 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965) pp. 98ff.
Charles Post, ‘The American Road to Capitalism’, New Left Review, no. 133 (1982) pp. 30–51.
Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind revised ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) pp. 100ff.
For a more biographically orientated exploration of Reagan’s myth-colonisation, see Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
Wright, Will, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
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© 1990 The Editorial Board, Lumière (Co-operative) Press Ltd
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Ellis, R.J. (1990). American National Identity and the Structure of Myth: Images of Reagan. In: Day, G. (eds) Readings in Popular Culture. Insights . Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20700-8_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20700-8_26
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