Friendship Fictions : The Rhetoric of Citizenship in the Liberal Imaginary Paperback / softback

Friendship serves as a metaphor for citizenship and mirrors the individual's participation in civic life.

Friendship Fictions unravels key implications of this metaphor and demonstrates how it can transform liberal culture into a more just and democratic way of life. A criticism often leveled at liberal democratic culture is its emphasis on the individual over community and private life over civic participation.

However, liberal democratic culture has a more complicated relationship to notions of citizenship.

As Michael Kaplan shows, citizenship comprises a major theme of popular entertainment, especially Hollywood film, and often takes the form of friendship narratives; and this is no accident.

Examining the representations of citizenship-as-friendship in four Hollywood films (The Big Chill, Thelma & Louise, Lost in Translation, and Smoke), Kaplan argues that critics have misunderstood some of liberal democracy's most significant features: its resilience, its capacity for self-revision, and the cultural resonance of its model of citizenship.

For Kaplan, friendship-with its dynamic pacts, fluid alliances, and contingent communities-is one arena in which preconceptions about individual participation in civic life are contested and complicated.

Friendship serves as a metaphor for citizenship and mirrors the individual's participation in civic life.

Friendship Fictions unravels key implications of this metaphor and demonstrates how it can transform liberal culture into a more just and democratic way of life.