2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and Jane Jacobs Urban
Communication Book Award finalist Starting with the premise that
suburban films, residential neighborhoods, 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 neighborhoods and chain restaurants
like Olive Garden and Macaroni Grill, through the megachurch’s
veneration of suburban malls to the mixed-use 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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