| This study sets out with the explicit goal of filling what I believe to be a gaping hole in the extant literary criticism of the Cold War period. Although a profusion of critical surveys, literary histories, and cultural histories retroactively examine the literature of one of the two Cold War superpowers, only a few critics have studied the works of both American and Russian writers in a comparative historiographic context. Although predicated on a broad-ranging interdisciplinary approach, it is nevertheless firmly rooted in literary analysis. The study is centered on a definition of subversive satire adapted from scholarship of both American and Russian literature. I examine fiction by such American authors as Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Coover, John Barth, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. as well as such Russian authors as Vasily Aksyonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Alexander Zinoviev, Vladimir Voinovich, Fazil Iskander, and Sasha Sokolov.;The complexity of the historical context that frames the primary texts, however, also requires considerable engagement with topics associated primarily with linguistics, history, sociology, political science, and philosophy. For example, Matthew Hirschberg's sociolinguistic study concerning the formation and maintenance of Cold War cognitive schemata provides an extraliterary supplement to Wolfgang Iser's theories about the role of fictionality in non-literary pursuits (i.e., domestic and/or international politics). The main goal of this project is to create a new historically oriented context in which previously unrelated interpretations of Russian and American satirical fictions can be reconciled according to the similarities in their intentions and techniques. I believe these similarities to reveal the absurdity of non-literary fictions that created and perpetuated an atmosphere in which "mutually assured destruction" was a palpable threat. |
