The Reflective Age
Nostalgia at the End of History

Zachary Griffith (Author)

9781978843783

Paperback / softback, published 9 December 2025

188 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.286 kg

"While peering beneath the surfaces of contemporary film, television, and literature, Griffith makes a compelling argument that mediated nostalgia in the twenty-first century is a hall of mirrors endlessly reflecting back upon itself. Covering politics, history, and popular culture, The Reflective Age is a valuable addition to the multidisciplinary field of nostalgia studies." - Adam Ochonicky, author of The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism

"In The Reflective Age, Griffith discerns kinship between such disparate works as Ready Player One, Stranger Things, and Hillbilly Elegy, all of which manage immediate economic discontents through retro fantasy. While contesting the cultural logic of nostalgia, his lucid, propulsive prose reaches toward the not yet lived." - Christopher Carter, author of The Rhetoric of Dystopia: Prophecies and Provocations in the Anthropocene

At the end of history, nothing ever really ends. Though characterized, on one hand, by sociopolitical and economic stasis, stagnation, and decline, twenty-first century American culture has also been marked by the constant ebb and flow of preexisting artifacts and styles, so that when one fades out of fashion it is always replaced by another reiteration. Change, on the cultural level, has accelerated at an unprecedented rate, and old things are constantly returning anew. The present, in other words, promotes the feeling that nothing is changing and, simultaneously, everything is. In the midst of this paradoxical sense of constant flux and grinding stagnation, underwritten by the notion that there is no alternative to the malaise of the present, the nostalgic past emerges as the only viable refuge. The Reflective Age investigates how nostalgic American media of the 2010s and early 2020s reflects––and contributes to––these conditions, showing how the films, TV shows, music, and literature of the period illustrate a radical shift in both the role that nostalgia plays in the American cultural and political landscape as well as in nostalgia itself.

Introduction 1
1 Ready Player One, Nostalgia, and Recognition 22
2 Stranger Things,
Nostalgia, and Aesthetics 56
3 Twin Peaks: The Return, Nostalgia, and Fantasies of
Repetition 80
4 Hillbilly Elegy, Nostalgia, and Right-Wing
Melodrama 104
Conclusion: Nostalgia After
the End of History? 147
Acknowledgments
153
Notes 155
Works Cited 163
Index 000