Nuclear families: The bomb and the future in the American middle class.
Item
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Title
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Nuclear families: The bomb and the future in the American middle class.
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Identifier
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AAI9969739
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identifier
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9969739
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Creator
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Taback, Peter S.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Morris Dickstein
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Date
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2000
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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The postwar American novel offers important testimony on the promise of the future in the American middle class within the historical and cultural moment of the atomic age. In this study, I question fundamental assumptions of the Cold War, particularly the degree to which an embrace of consumer goods eclipsed the impact of the nuclear arsenal on the affluent middle class. In fiction that scrutinizes postwar complacency, an obvious irony lies in the unfolding middle class commitment to quality of life while the nation grappled with the chance of imminent apocalypse. Though Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro" recognizes the countercultural response to the bomb, mainstream American writing contains a reaction to the threat of thermonuclear war that reflects the anxiety of the figure Mailer calls "the square." Separate chapters on Lionel Trilling, John Cheever, Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo indicate that assumptions about quality of life are the result of sublimated nuclear anxiety, not a booming postwar economy. Trilling's understanding of American culture in the aftermath of World War II brings to his fiction an early illustration of this future-orientation. His short stories and his novel The Middle of the Journey consider "the well-loved child of the middle class" during this period of historical uncertainty. In short stories and the Wapshot novels, John Cheever considers questions of continuity and catastrophe in the newly-created suburbs that define middle-class affluence. Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet revises Cheever's assumptions in the light of 20th history as an allegory of U.S. thermonuclear imperialism. The final chapter treats Don DeLillo's Underworld as a post-Cold War coda, where the absence of an ideological foe dismantles the mid-century American community that reacted to the bomb in unison. The impact of the bomb on expectations of prosperity reconfigures the future-orientation of the middle class, placing in a new light its influence on American abundance.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
