| 书目名称 | Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature | | 编辑 | Erin Mercer | | 视频video | http://file.papertrans.cn/828/827543/827543.mp4 | | 丛书名称 | American Literature Readings in the 21st Century | | 图书封面 |  | | 描述 | This study of fiction produced in America in the decade following 1945 examines literature by writers such as Kerouac and Bellow. It examines how, though such fiction seemed to resolutely avoid the events and implications of World War II, it was still suffused with dread and suggestions of war in imagery and language. | | 出版日期 | Book 2011 | | 关键词 | America; Amerikanische Literatur; fiction; realism | | 版次 | 1 | | doi | https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119093 | | isbn_softcover | 978-1-349-29393-3 | | isbn_ebook | 978-0-230-11909-3Series ISSN 2634-579X Series E-ISSN 2634-5803 | | issn_series | 2634-579X | | copyright | Erin Mercer 2011 |
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Front Matter |
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Abstract
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,Missing in Action: Repression, Return, and the Post-War Uncanny, |
Erin Mercer |
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Abstract
Even the most cursory glance over literature produced in America during the first decade following the end of World War II raises an unexpected and perplexing problem: none of the novels engage with the recent trauma of the most defining events of the twentieth century—the mass death due to the war, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombing of Japan. We might expect an era negotiating the unprecedented violence of a war with a casualty toll estimated at 50 million people to produce literature dealing with the new and terrifying aspects of mid-twentieth-century life. Certainly, the example of the literary tradition following the First World War would encourage us to look for something similar following the second conflict.. Yet what we find is exactly the opposite. The first American novels ostensibly about the Second World War, such as James Gould Cozzens’s . (1948) and Herman Wouk’s . (1951), studiously avoided both the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, even managing in many cases to completely avoid depictions of combat. While popular novels such as . (1946) and . (1955) purport to deal with the new difficulties facing the post-war American, the anxieties dealt with are provoked by conf
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,Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: Norman Mailer’s ,, |
Erin Mercer |
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Abstract
Mailer’s . (1948) adheres to the practice of the era’s war novels by focusing on acceptable social and political issues, but it is unusual in its inclusion of uncanny automatons, strangely malevolent environments, and superstitions regarding death. It was Mailer’s first novel and proved to be a bestseller. In a period fascinated with psychology, the detailed portraits of the numerous characters provided a sense of reality lauded for its grittiness but that was also a familiar aspect of literature depicting war. There is little in the way of plot, with much of the long novel painstakingly recording the mundane details of military life: the digging of foxholes, the waiting for command, the building of roads, the transportation of materials, the eating of rations. There are numerous flashback scenes detailing the soldiers’ lives prior to the platoon’s arrival on the Pacific Island, and the denouement is a disastrous reconnaissance mission that turns out to be unnecessary since the survivors return to base only to discover that the island had been successfully taken by the Allied forces in a separate maneuver. Yet despite the emphasis on conventional psychology and the quotidian aspect
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,Haunting and Race: Ralph Ellison’s ,, |
Erin Mercer |
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Abstract
World War II saw more than one million African Americans in military service, and by 1944 racial tensions within the rigidly segregated army were so problematic that the War Department was forced to prohibit racial discrimination in recreational and transportation facilities in a bid to ease the situation. Black leaders utilized the racial intolerance highlighted by the war in what was referred to as the “double V” campaign: African Americans were urged to support the war effort and ensure victory over fascism abroad, while maintaining the fight against segregation and discrimination for a victory over Jim Crow in America.. Although conditions for African Americans in the military did improve somewhat as the war progressed and they were increasingly able to hold combat rather than menial positions, there was continual racial harassment and little opportunity for career advancement. Perhaps even worse was the fact that many soldiers returned home after honorable service to find themselves expected to use separate bathrooms and train compartments.
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,The Sacred Other: Flannery O’Connor’s ,, |
Erin Mercer |
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Abstract
Flannery O’Connor’s . (1952) begins by depicting a burial of the war experience, which acts not only as a catalyst for the fictional action but as a metaphor revealing the defining impulse of post-war American life.. The opening pages describe Hazel Motes travelling home just two days after his release from military service, and his first action upon disembarking the train is to buy a new suit and unceremoniously stuff his uniform into a trash can. Hazel disguises this desecration by wrapping his uniform in paper, and O’Connor’s potentially subversive views on the war are similarly disguised. From this outrageous moment the narrative turns resolutely away from the Second World War to focus on the post-war commodification of religion and Hazel’s struggle toward enlightenment. The protagonist’s reactions to the recent conflict are barely alluded to, and the society into which he attempts to reintegrate has similarly discarded the ambiguous aspects of mass violence and large-scale destruction in order to pursue successfully socialized domestic lives. For . protagonist as well as its author, the homogenized value systems parading as post-war religion, outlined by authors such as Norman
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,Dubious Reality and the Double: Saul Bellow’s , |
Erin Mercer |
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Abstract
According to Arnold Jacob Wolf, Saul Bellow’s Jewish heritage is often perceived as an “equivocal and somewhat mysterious” aspect of h is identity,. a perception encouraged both by Bellow’s personal statements and interpretations of his fiction. Bellow consistently denied he was a “Jewish writer,” preferring to identify himself as “an American, a Jew, a writer by trade.”. This stance emphasizes his American identity, important during the 1940s and 1950s when integration was deemed highly desirable, while also protecting the author from anti-Semitism and his work from myopically “ethnic” interpretation. It also reveals something of Bellow’s feelings about the Holocaust. His 1947 novel The Victim includes an opening epigraph depicting mass trauma, a title referring to individual suffering, and a narrative revolving around anti-Semitism, yet despite the novel’s depiction of pervasive dread and ethnic intolerance, and despite the fact that it appeared just two years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust is noticeable primarily through its absence. While Bellow’s 1970 novel . focuses on a Jewish protagonist whose war experience includes escaping from a pit of corpses and spending
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,The Familiar Made Strange: Paul Bowles’s ,, |
Erin Mercer |
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Abstract
Paul Bowles’s uncompromising explorations into the darker aspects of human existence saw him occupy a curious position in post-war American culture. Given the era’s predominant urge to celebrate the familiar and cozy, Bowles’s depictions of extreme and often random violence in prose characterized by “a terrifying and macabre stillness that scarcely masks a cruel and compassionless universe,”. his status as an expatriate in North Africa, his brief membership in the Communist Party during the late 1930s, and his open disavowals of modernity (of which America was perhaps the leading example) seem more likely to promise commercial failure than success. Nevertheless, . (1949) remained on the . bestseller list for 10 weeks in early 1950 and sold more than 200,000 paperback copies in 1951.
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,Repression and Confession: Jack Kerouac’s ,, |
Erin Mercer |
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Abstract
In . (1968) Jack Kerouac confesses through his fictional alter ego that the events of the 1940s rendered him “eviscerated of 1930s innocent ambition.”. The sense of disillusionment engendered by the mass trauma of World War II and the personal losses Kerouac suffered during those years—his best friend Sebastian Sampas killed serving as a medic, over 500 of his Merchant Marine colleagues killed in a torpedo strike, his father’s death in 1946—is palpable in . but strangely obscured in ., which was composed and set in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Because . was not published until 1957, and because it uses a confessional mode that was to become dominant during the 1960s, it has become common to associate it with the ferment of an emerging counterculture of protest and revolt rather than with the repressive years following the end of World War II. Although Gilbert Millstein’s 1957 review in the . suggests the relevance of the events of the 1940s to . by likening it to that “testament” of the Lost Generation, Ernest Hemingway’s ., . the dominant response to the book followed David Dempsey’s lead, whose review in the . three days after Millstein’s emphasizes its “aimless travel, women,
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,The Concealment that Fails to Conceal, |
Erin Mercer |
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Abstract
In a 1945 . editorial written just four days following the Japanese surrender, Norman Cousin suggested that whatever elation America’s victory entailed was “severely tempered by a primitive fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend.” The classical form of this terror, “the fear of irrational death,” was transformed during one night in August 1945 to “burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions.”. If Cousin is correct in observing this terrifying return of the repressed, it did not take long for the primitive fears provoked by World War II to be contained and controlled. In the first few months of the post-war era anthropologist Robert Redfield observed that America was in the grips of a “fear psychosis,”. but by 1950 Lewis Mumford suggested that so profound was the state of “self-enclosed delusions” through which Americans were blotting out the new and terrible reality that surrounded them, that if it appeared in an individual it would demand psychiatric treatment.
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Back Matter |
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Abstract
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