| My dissertation examines ways Cold War fiction engages the politics and sociology of reading in post-World War II America. Juxtaposing texts by Alfred Hitchcock, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth with scores of post-war political, academic, and popular "how to read" books, I identify a national preoccupation with reading that had implications for the citizen, subject, and nation during this highly polarized time of political uncertainty. From the school house to the White House, Americans were actively engaged in classifying the reading public, defining "good" literature, teaching "good" reading skills, and cultivating "fit" reader-citizens. I propose that the injunction to read "good books" was a central component of problematic post-war efforts to define and delimit "America," "Americans," and "American literature." Dictates on what and how one should read in Cold War America sought to contain the individual within a particular social sphere and attempted to prevent "dangerous" reading habits that could challenge the established political, economic, and cultural order.; My study argues that Cold War fiction and film both challenge and oftentimes reinforce the dominant conceptions of cultural literacy central to America's resurgent nationalism. While much early Cold War fiction recognizes that the rhetoric of post-war reading crusades often advanced a paranoid political and social agenda, much of this fiction fails to escape the ordering impulse central to the narrative it is critiquing and is reinterpreted into the dominant discourse. Later Cold War fiction problematizes the very idea of structured meaning-making, challenging not only the dominant conception of a "fit" reader-citizen, but the act of reading itself. These texts signal a transition from an empirical mode of interpretation based on order, systems, and "facts," to a method of reading grounded in multiplicity, possibility, and textual play. I argue that these works are part of a larger radical discourse seeking to redefine interpretive processes, reinvest individual readers with authority, and reforge social connections fractured by Cold War containment policies. |
