American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical ReassessmentSteven Belletto, Daniel Grausam The time is right for a critical reassessment of Cold War culture both because its full cultural impact remains unprocessed and because some of the chief paradigms for understanding that culture confuse rather than clarify. A collection of the work of some of the best cultural critics writing about the period, American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War reveals a broad range of ways that American cultural production from the late 1940s to the present might be understood in relation to the Cold War. Critically engaging the reigning paradigms that equate postwar U.S. culture with containment culture, the authors present suggestive revisionist claims. Their essays draw on a literary archive—including the works of John Updike, Joan Didion, Richard E. Kim, Allen Ginsberg, Edwin Denby, Alice Childress, Frank Herbert, and others—strikingly different from the one typically presented in accounts of the period. Likewise, the authors describe phenomena—such as the FBI’s surveillance of writers (especially African Americans), biopolitics, development theory, struggles over the centralization and decentralization of government, and the cultural work of Reaganism—that open up new contexts for discussing postwar culture. Extending the timeline and expanding the geographic scope of Cold War culture, this book reveals both the literature and the culture of the time to be more dynamic and complex than has been generally supposed. |
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aesthetic American antitotalitarian Arrakis Assorted documents dated Balanchine’s Ballet Boca Boca Grande Cage’s Caladan Charlotte Charlotte’s cited parenthetically Cold War Cold War culture Communist counterintelligence critical critique Dance Writings decentralized decolonizing democracy Denby’s Dune Ecology ofMind Edwin Denby enemy essay FBI’s Federal Bureau fiction file obtained film Frank Herbert Frank O’Hara Freedom of Information Fremen frontier global Grace Gregory Bateson Herbert Hoover human Ibid imperialism Information Act intelligence Internal case file intimacy Joan Didion John John Updike Kennedy Kennedy’s Kim’s Korean War Liet-Kynes literary literature Mailer Martyred modernization Nadel narrative North North Korea novel O’Hara obtained under provisions old w ari Packed Dirt Paul’s poems poetry political postcolonial postwar Pyongyang race reading Reagan rollback social South Korean Soviet Spivak Star Wars story strategy Subsequent quotations tion totalitarianism United States Federal University Press Updike Updike’s Vietnam War’s Western Yoda York