Democracy and dystopia in post-Watergate American fiction

In late twentieth-century United States popular culture there have been so many recent works produced about the decline of American democracy that creating narratives that contain a dystopic vision of the United States have become an industry in and of itself. This trend to depict the United States as a dystopia is also evident in many late-twentieth century American literary texts such as David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002), George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (2004), and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). In them, the United States is often seen as an immoral, confusing wasteland; a nation led by a politically corrupt, ineffective government that defrauds the public to pursue its own agendas. In such narratives, dystopia is often portrayed as a place devoid of cultural unity, civility, or a vital center that holds disparate peoples together.;The purpose of this dissertation is to study how this debate about and portrayal of American democratic decline is presented in United States fiction since 1972 and to discuss how the primary texts in my study respond to these issues. I have chosen 1972 as a defining moment in this project since it is the year that the Watergate scandal occurred which led to the resignation of then President Richard Nixon and, in many popular accounts of the period, signaled the end of the 1960s utopian dreams of social progress. To portray this approach to the period's concerns with dystopia and scapegoating, I have elected to write about these four novels: Toni Morrison's Sula (1973), Robert Coover's The Public Burning (1977), Stephen King's The Dead Zone (1979), and Joyce Carol Oates's Zombie (1995). I chose these novels because they fictionally portray a conflict between democratic ideals and social reality. While other social narratives offer unity, communal harmony and order as the key to restoring public faith in democratic institutions and representatives, these novels portray the achievement of these ideals as impractical and unlikely when their attainment seems dependent on the abjection of another individual or group.