Bonfires of the American Dream in American Rhetoric, Literature and Film

How could American social solidarity have so collapsed that we cannot even cooperate in fighting a pandemic? One problem lies in how our values mutate and intersect in an era of runaway high-end inequality and evaporating upward mobility. Under such conditions, the American Dream’s seeming to suggest, falsely, that those who succeed economically are “winners,” while the rest of us are “losers,” puts it in dire conflict with our traditions of democracy and egalitarianism. In Bonfires of the American Dream, through close cultural studies of classic novels and films – Atlas Shrugged, The Great Gatsby, It’s a Wonderful Life, and The Wolf of Wall Street – Daniel Shaviro helps to provide a better understanding of what went wrong culturally in America.