Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T10:31:39.910Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Raymond Malewitz
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This essay charts the emergence of “rugged consumers” in contemporary American culture: skilled laborers who confront the disappearance of manufacturing jobs during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the accompanying sense of labor's marginality in American society. Although they are alienated from sites of industrial productivity, rugged consumers find alternative means of practicing their skills by creatively misusing, repairing, and repurposing the commodities in their environments. At the same time, they ennoble such actions by modeling them on the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism. Whether in literature or in the broader culture, American rugged consumers thus mediate between the mythic models of self-sufficiency celebrated by the country's older, frontier capitalism and the postindustrial realities of the present. The essay posits four provisional categories of rugged consumerism, ranging from the hypermasculine weaponization of unlikely objects to the (re)creation of environmentally sustainable interior designs.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 3 , May 2012 , pp. 526 - 541
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Interview. Bookreporter.com. Book Report, May 2003. Web. 5 Jan. 2010.Google Scholar
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Random, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Atwood, Margaret. Year of the Flood. New York: Doubleday, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Berger, Shoshana. “Interview with Charles and Hudson.” Charles and Hudson. Charles and Hudson, 3 Mar. 2008. Web. 11 Aug. 2009.Google Scholar
The Best of Instructables. Vol. 1. Sebastopol: Make, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 1–16. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawford, Matthew. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
DeLillo, Don. “In the Ruins of the Future.” Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 22 Dec. 2001. Web. 5 Jan. 2010.Google Scholar
Edenson, Tim. Industrial Ruins. New York: Berg, 2005. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward. New York: Harper, 1962. Print.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Hofstadter, Albert. New York: Perennial-Harper, 2001. 15–86. Print.Google Scholar
Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Watertown: Eastgate, 1995. CD-ROM.Google Scholar
Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place for Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Print.Google Scholar
Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper's Magazine. Harper's Magazine Foundation, Feb. 2007. Web. 5 Jan. 2010.Google Scholar
Malewitz, Raymond. “Anything Can Be an Instrument: Misuse Value and Rugged Consumerism in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.” Contemporary Literature 50.4 (2009): 721–41. Print.Google Scholar
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print.Google Scholar
McDonough, William, and Braungart, Michael. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point, 2002. Print.Google Scholar
Obama, Barack. “Alliance for American Manufacturing Address.” David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh. 14 Apr. 2008. Council on Foreign Relations. CFR. Web. 23 Mar. 2012.Google Scholar
Owen, David. “The Inventor's Dilemma.” New Yorker 17 May 2010: 42–50. Print.Google Scholar
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1973. Print.Google Scholar
Thompson, Clive. “The Dream Factory.” Wired. Condé Nast Digital, Sept. 2005. Web. 5 Jan. 2010.Google Scholar
Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1920. 1–38. Print.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. New York: Verso, 2010. Print.Google Scholar