Brooke Bennett - 20th Century Cultural History
After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2022, Brooke completed a Master’s in American Studies at Columbia University and is now working on her PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she studies 20th century American cultural criticism and intellectual history.
Area of Concentration Courses
American Studies 101 - The Harlem Renaissance
American Studies 101 - Dust and Chrome: America and the 1930s
English 174 - The 1970s
American Studies 101 - Classical Music and American Mass Culture Between the World Wars
American Studies 110 - Learning from Disney
Thesis
American Dream or Suburban Nightmare?: Revisiting Dualistic Depictions of the Nation’s Dominant Landscape
Following World War II, the detached, single-family home was established as the material benchmark for the American Dream. While the perception that the suburbs were a bucolic utopia began much earlier than the late 1940s, the suburban ideal took on newfound meaning and importance in the post-war era. As millions of veterans returned home, mass suburbanization swept over the country on an unprecedented scale. Alongside the development of the physical landscape, pervasive depictions of the valorized nuclear family and dream house in mid century popular culture helped cultivate a powerful image of suburban fantasy. However, the sweeping changes that suburbanization wrought on both the physical and cultural landscape also caused great anxiety, resulting in harsh critiques of the suburbs in the following decades. In turn, these conflicting views established the suburbs as a deeply polarizing milieu. In the 1980s and ‘90s, a wave of films set in the suburbs explored the lingering unease surrounding the landscape. The genre, known as the “Suburban Gothic,” demonstrates that these dualistic visions of the suburbs—as utopian fantasy or dystopian nightmare—are both fantastical. The suburbs are shown instead to be a profoundly mythic landscape in American culture, the symbolic meaning of which can be used to explore and challenge fears, as well as fantasies. Using films such as Pleasantville (dir. Gary Ross, 1998), The Virgin Suicides (dir. Sofia Coppola, 1999), and American Beauty (dir. Sam Mendes, 1999), I seek to demonstrate how the Suburban Gothic ultimately reveals the suburban dichotomy to be two sides of the same coin.
