Abstract

The course treated film, fiction, and all matter of non-fiction as textual representations equally worthy of critical analysis. Distinctions between signifiers from domains traditionally labeled "rhetoric" and those from domains labeled "poetics" held no water. Like Linkon's syllabus from two decades ago, The Half Life of Deindustrialization assumes that all texts have the potential to reveal important insights about cultural myths and values. Her engaging study looks at texts from a wide range of genres that offer representations of deindustrialization in the United States. Linkon sees memory, nostalgia, socio-economic insecurity, community, pride, and politics through a critical lens, offering a nuanced and compelling portrait of how deindustrialization still reverberates, even decades after initial waves of plant and factory closings.