Voyaging With The Nationally Bound Subject: Neo-Romantic Itineraries In The Popular Narratives Of Midnight Express, Rising Sun, And North Shore

Abstract

What follows are three chapters, each of which treats what I am calling, for better or for worse, the discourse/s of neo-romanticism. The three works which I chose as examples of this, namely Midnight Express, Rising Sun, and North Shore, follow a rough chronological outline of three successive decades, beginning in the 1970s. I have selected each work as being particularly representative of its decade's larger socio-economic concerns as they relate/d to the matrices of neo-romanticism. Furthermore, these examples traverse national boundaries, and in a sense travel in between one another. This is not to imply that I have a sense of progression or a definitive mapping in mind. There is no linear movement from chapter to chapter, only a spiraling, in the Foucauldian sense, of different, though intermeshed themes. Successive, then, is perhaps not the right word to employ here. I use it guardedly, however, for it connotes both success, which is intimately tied to U.S. conceptions of nationhood, and is deeply enmeshed in the topoi of popular culture. Also denoted is a kind of movement through time and space which is unstable and vulnerable within the broader framework of transnational, capitalist imperatives. Neo-romanticism's success and succession lies precisely in its flexibility to adapt to widely fluctuating U.S. geo-political interests.