| My dissertation reclaims for the progressive legacy of the 1960s American literary texts from that decade responding to the impossible ideals and promised privileges of white manhood. Refuting recent notions of a white male crisis traceable simply to challenges posed by 60s political movements, I argue this "crisis" has coordinates in ongoing yet historically transforming anxieties about race, gender, and American democracy and the advent of subjectivity itself. I begin with a major mid-century manifestation of these anxieties in discourse surrounding the "adjustment" of American soldiers, an event demonstrating white male ambivalence toward normative manhood at an historical moment---the 1950s---when whiteness and masculinity seemingly reigned.;Having begun to display the destructive structural and historical failure of white masculinity to realize its impossible demands, I turn to four significant 60s texts as-yet unrecognized for their staging of these tensions. First examining John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), I show how the rebellion enacted by Rabbit's flight from postwar normativity exemplifies resistant white masculinity's foundations in a melancholia that animates but potentially compromises its efficacy as political protest. Next analyzing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), I read Ken Kesey's novel as instantiating the counterculture's renegotiation of American manhood, whereby the "Indian" is made to stand for an originary primitiveness appearing to free white masculinity of modern demands while bearing an entitled, identity-affirming connection to the land. In Michael Hen's writings on Vietnam, from late-60s magazine pieces to Dispatches (1977), I trace the way one writer comes to disrupt the fantasy of American manhood through his dramatization of white masculinity's simultaneous seductiveness and violence. I conclude by interpreting Mario Puzo's The Godfather (1969) within the context of early 1970s neoconservativism and cultural pluralism, finding a reactionary allure that bespeaks post-60s white male American crisis but also reveals the long-entrenched pathologies of individualism and capitalism informing normative manhood. This study thus insists that unmasking white masculinity as an impossibility marked by its failed, often violent, performances is a vital project for an American literary discipline infused by critical race and gender studies and seeking to unearth the national imaginary ever more fully. |
