ABSTRACT
This chapter defines the central object of the book: the “Other America.” This is the fictional country that ideally connects the oeuvres of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits. It descends from a combination of ideas and ideals of an intellectual tradition that began with the fathers of American literature. Walt Whitman’s essay Democratic Vistas (1871) is analysed as a founding document of this tradition and adopted to find links with the literature, cinema and music that carried on its values in the twentieth century. Attention is then paid to the works of American scholars Richard Rorty and Todd Gitlin who analysed the dissolution of the original republican spirit and the demise of progressive thought in the United States after the 1960s. Their writing helps shape the idea of Other America and the concepts that I extrapolate from the works of the three authors – especially with regard to the utopian impulses for equality, freedom, and togetherness contained therein.
