The Reflective Age - by Zachary Griffith (Paperback)

About the Book

The Reflective Age investigates the cultural and political context that led to the nostalgia boom in American media of the 2010s, showing how films, TV shows, music, and literature of the period herald a radical shift in both the role nostalgia plays in the American cultural landscape and in nostalgia itself.

Book Synopsis

At the end of history, nothing ever really ends. Though characterized, on one hand, by sociopolitical and economic stasis, stagnation, and decline, twenty-first century American culture has also been marked by the constant ebb and flow of preexisting artifacts and styles, so that when one fades out of fashion it is always replaced by another reiteration. Change, on the cultural level, has accelerated at an unprecedented rate, and old things are constantly returning anew. The present, in other words, promotes the feeling that nothing is changing and, simultaneously, everything is. In the midst of this paradoxical sense of constant flux and grinding stagnation, underwritten by the notion that there is no alternative to the malaise of the present, the nostalgic past emerges as the only viable refuge. The Reflective Age investigates how nostalgic American media of the 2010s and early 2020s reflects--and contributes to--these conditions, showing how the films, TV shows, music, and literature of the period illustrate a radical shift in both the role that nostalgia plays in the American cultural and political landscape as well as in nostalgia itself.

Review Quotes

"In The Reflective Age, Griffith discerns kinship between such disparate works as Ready Player One, Stranger Things, and Hillbilly Elegy, all of which manage immediate economic discontents through retro fantasy. While contesting the cultural logic of nostalgia, his lucid, propulsive prose reaches toward the not yet lived."--Christopher Carter "author of The Rhetoric of Dystopia: Prophecies and Provocations in the Anthropocene"

"While peering beneath the surfaces of contemporary film, television, and literature, Griffith makes a compelling argument that mediated nostalgia in the twenty-first century is a hall of mirrors endlessly reflecting back upon itself. Covering politics, history, and popular culture, The Reflective Age is a valuable addition to the multidisciplinary field of nostalgia studies."--Adam Ochonicky "author of The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism"

About the Author

ZACHARY GRIFFITH is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. This will be his first book.