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Smith, Jeff. "Imagining Presidents: Fictions of American Leadership in Popular Literature, Film, Drama, and Electronic Media ," English and Literature Departments, University of Chicago, October 2006. Advisor: James Lastra
This dissertation is the first comprehensive survey of imaginative works novels, films, stage plays and musicals, television dramas and comedies, and works for digital media and the internet—in which American presidents figure importantly as characters. At a time when “presidential fictions” seem to be proliferating, it identifies such fictions as a distinct “archive” and subject of study; notes patterns among them, including genres, story cycles, and recurring themes; discusses their connection to the real political events and developments that they reflect or helped influence; and explores the ways in which they ve evolved, over more than two hundred years, in response to the possibilities offered both by new media and by changing conventions of story- and image-making. Joining a growing body of literature on cultural “imagining,” “representing,” “inventing” and “memory,” the study aims to further previous scholarship on iconic character types, adding “president” to the list of characters that have been subjects of recent cultural histories (the mother, the killer, the Indian, the teenage girl, the hillbilly, and others). It also aims to contribute to scholarship on presidential image-making, extending our understanding of the ways in which presidents are imagined by including “presidents” who never existed except in the imagination—but who, nonetheless, in some cases influenced real political developments. One major premise, borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, is that nations themselves come into being through acts of imagination. It follows that their leadership is also imaginatively constructed—that the fiction often precedes the reality, which is continually redefined through struggles over shared memory and belief. The many fictions examined in this study can, therefore, help explain what Americans have sought from the presidency, and why the actual institution has taken the specific shapes that it has.
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