A Cultural History of the Emergence of American Exceptionalism after World War II

我提出的项目涉及一部文化史，讲述了二战后几年美国民众想象中的“美国例外论”的起源和发展。“美国例外论”是一个独特的国家，有着领导世界的特殊命运。我希望证明例外论是如何明确地成为美国在战后解决方案中崛起为大国地位的一种功能，并至关重要的是，理解和记录它后来嵌入美国集体想象的确切过程。这项研究将基于对流行文化来源的分析，主要是漫画书和电影，大致按时间跨度从20世纪30年代到70年代。这样做的原因有两个。首先，虽然例外论已经成为美国国家认同的一个组成部分，但我认为，许多关于例外论起源和发展的学术文献都没有足够的历史化，使得它成为一个从新的方法论角度重新审视的话题。其次，我相信这种流行文化来源在研究思想史方面具有强大的解释潜力。从少数上流社会知识分子的作品中脱颖而出，对流行文化来源的分析揭示了此类话语的存在、传播和运作远远超出精英圈子的严格限制，并更有力地展示了它们广泛、不可预测和变革的潜力。

My proposed project entails a cultural history of the origins and growth of 'American exceptionalism'-the notion theUnited States is somehow a unique nation with a special destiny to lead the world-in the American popular imaginationin the years after the Second World War. I hope to demonstrate how exceptionalism is explicitly a function of theAmerican rise to great power status in the post-war settlement and, crucially, to understand and historicise the exactprocess whereby it subsequently became embedded in the collective American imagination. The research will be basedon analysis of popular cultural sources, primarily comic books and films, and roughly spanning chronologically from the1930s to the 1970s. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, though exceptionalism has become an integral facet ofAmerican national identity, I contend much academic literature on its origins and development is insufficientlyhistoricised, making it a topic ripe for re-examination from a new methodological perspective. Secondly, I am convincedof the powerful explanatory potential of such popular cultural sources in studying the history of ideas. Decentring thenarrative away from the works of a select few, high-society intellectuals, the analysis of popular cultural sources revealsthe existence, circulation, and operation of such discourses far beyond the tight confines of elite circles anddemonstrates more powerfully their widespread, unpredictable, and transformative potential.