Studies in Literature and Language
The Geographical Heterotopia in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X
Abstract
By locating Palm Springs, the setting of Generation X, within the highly capitalist American society in the 1990s, Coupland transforms it into a geographical heterotopia in terms of both spatial and temporal dimensions—spatially it is distinct from the middle-class working environment characteristic of modern urban America; temporally it resists the stereotypical scenarios of the West that have been all-too-often sedimented in the public mind since American Westward expansion. By highlighting the anti-capitalist ethos and apocalyptic tones of this geographical heterotopia, Coupland expresses his disappointment with and resistance to all-pervasive capitalism in US.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Ambrose, S. E., & Brinkley, D. (1997). Rise to globalism: American foreign policy since 1938. New York: Penguin Books.
Coupland, D. (1996). Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture. London: Abacus.
Crang, M. (1998). Cultural geography. London: Routledge.
Deverell, W. (1996). Fighting words: The significance of the American west in the history of the United States. In C. A. Milner (Ed.), A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West (pp. 29-55). New York: Oxford University Press.
Durham, P., & Jones, E. L. (Eds.). (1980). The frontier in American literature. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing.
Forshaw, M. (2000). Douglas Coupland: In and out of ‘ironic hell’. Critical Survey, 12(3), 39-58.
Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces (J. Miskowiec, Trans.). Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27.
Jones, K. R., & Wills, J. (2009). The American west: Competing visions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.
Katerberg, W. H. (2005). Western myth and the end of history in the novels of Douglas Coupland. Western American Literature, 40(3), 272-299.
Smith, H. N. (1970). Virgin land: The American west as symbol and myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Tate, A. (2002). Now—here is my secret: Ritual and epiphany in Douglas Coupland’s fiction. Literature and Theology, 16(3), 326-338.
Turner, F. J. (1980). The Significance of the frontier in American history. In P. Durham & E. L. Jones (Eds.), The frontier in American literature (pp. 9-19). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing.
Wright, J. B. (2003). Land tenure: The spatial musculature of American west. In G. J. Hausladen (Ed.), Western places, American myth: How we think about the west (85-110). Reno: University of Nevada Press.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/11336
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2019 Yingjie Duan
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Share us to: 
Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard
Please send your manuscripts to sll@cscanada.net，or sll@cscanada.org for consideration. We look forward to receiving your work.
We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org
Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).
STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office
Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org
E-mail: office@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com
Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture 
