Flyover Fictions: Polarization in U.S.-American Culture, Media, and Politics

Flyover Fictions critically engages the history and contemporary use of the ＂flyover country＂ trope in American culture and repurposes the concept as an abstract tool for cultural studies. The term ＂flyover＂ arose in the 1970s with variations--＂flyover country,＂ ＂flyover states＂--mainly used as synonyms for the American Midwest in intranational banter regarding cultural differences from the dominant urban centers of New York City and Los Angeles. In recent years, the trope has shifted away from this playfulness and its traditional geographic reference points to indicate larger political and cultural developments that speak of a deepening polarization in the United States.

Flyover Fictions is an exploration of the trope’s current politicization, historical contexts, and general proliferation of meanings. Instead of resolving the ambiguities inherent in the concept, the volume considers what can be done with these ambiguities, and how precisely their fuzziness might be used to create an analytic tool to describe, understand, and critique processes of cultural hierarchization. The contributors show how flyover fictions may operate in different national contexts and also internationally or transnationally, not only providing a fresh perspective on historical and contemporary American culture but also supplying a conceptual toolbox for broader use.

Cornelia Klecker is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. She is the author of Spoiler Alert! Mind-Tricking Narratives in Contemporary Hollywood Film and the editor in chief of the Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies. Sascha Pöhlmann is a professor of American literature and culture at Technical University Dortmund. He is the author of Future-Founding Poetry: Topographies of Beginnings from Whitman to the Twenty-First Century and Vote with a Bullet: Assassination in American Fiction.