...No that's a terrible answer, but. I have read very little "literature" that wasn't on school reading lists, but the dominant theme in everything of American origin that I had to read in high school English classes and my Fiction teacher's terrible literary fiction class was basically this narrative of "they sold me this vision of what my life was going to be life, and it isn't, sob," pretty much always from a middle-aged white dude's perspective (but never, NEVER in the stuff I read, with enough perspective to notice that the unfulfilled vision being angsted about was only promised to white dudes in the first place >_>). So I guess a combo of your first and third points.
But I did get to a point in that Fiction class where a friend and I were seriously discussing the implications in the fact that like every third story set pre-1950s seemed to end with the wangsty white dude throwing himself in front of a train.
And on a more serious note, trains/distance/space/travel is a theme that I've found explored very heavily in American literature. I don't know about UNIQUE, because I haven't read much literature from other parts of the world, but the only other thing I've found even remotely paralleling it is pre-British Chinese narratives about riverboats (which approach it in a very different way, but are still about the vastness and breadth of China and the distance traveled across it). America is so much larger than much of Europe, where its main literary heritage comes from, and the Manifest Destiny narrative of crossing east-to-west to tame wild lands, with all the focus on the drama of the journey and the separation it entailed from the familiar, has a pretty big impact on the American psyche even now. (Roadtrips are the modern equivalent, and my college friend who actually LIKES literary stuff probably has every American roadtrip movie and book ever made, which I think is kind of telling, though whether about literary fiction or about her I'm not sure.) The drifter across America's rails/roadways is pretty emblematic in a lot of the stuff I've read, in a lot of different ways.
I actually included some speculation on the nature of how families in American sitcoms are unrealistically close and how it probably relates to the fact that given the large landmass that the US covers it probably reflects fears of drifting apart seeing as family is likely to be spread all over the country, or even world seeing as so many people emigrate to America in a media essay. Yeah, distance is certainly something that should be covered, thanks!
I've also noticed- well, with British cinema (Deathly Hallows being a notable exception) generally speaking the action is confined to a handful of sets generally all within a mile or so of each other within the geography of the story told in the movie, whereas America has this culture of roadtrip movies and stories, with a lot of them getting tied into the coming of age tale or acceptance. So yeah, definitely a cultural diff in the texts there.
...No that's a terrible answer, but. I have read very little "literature" that wasn't on school reading lists, but the dominant theme in everything of American origin that I had to read in high school English classes and my Fiction teacher's terrible literary fiction class was basically this narrative of "they sold me this vision of what my life was going to be life, and it isn't, sob," pretty much always from a middle-aged white dude's perspective (but never, NEVER in the stuff I read, with enough perspective to notice that the unfulfilled vision being angsted about was only promised to white dudes in the first place >_>). So I guess a combo of your first and third points.
But I did get to a point in that Fiction class where a friend and I were seriously discussing the implications in the fact that like every third story set pre-1950s seemed to end with the wangsty white dude throwing himself in front of a train.
And on a more serious note, trains/distance/space/travel is a theme that I've found explored very heavily in American literature. I don't know about UNIQUE, because I haven't read much literature from other parts of the world, but the only other thing I've found even remotely paralleling it is pre-British Chinese narratives about riverboats (which approach it in a very different way, but are still about the vastness and breadth of China and the distance traveled across it). America is so much larger than much of Europe, where its main literary heritage comes from, and the Manifest Destiny narrative of crossing east-to-west to tame wild lands, with all the focus on the drama of the journey and the separation it entailed from the familiar, has a pretty big impact on the American psyche even now. (Roadtrips are the modern equivalent, and my college friend who actually LIKES literary stuff probably has every American roadtrip movie and book ever made, which I think is kind of telling, though whether about literary fiction or about her I'm not sure.) The drifter across America's rails/roadways is pretty emblematic in a lot of the stuff I've read, in a lot of different ways.
/sleep-deprived babble
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I've also noticed- well, with British cinema (Deathly Hallows being a notable exception) generally speaking the action is confined to a handful of sets generally all within a mile or so of each other within the geography of the story told in the movie, whereas America has this culture of roadtrip movies and stories, with a lot of them getting tied into the coming of age tale or acceptance. So yeah, definitely a cultural diff in the texts there.
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