Monstrous Rhetoric: &lt;i&gt;Naked Lunch&lt;/i&gt;, National Insecurity, and the Gothic Fifties

Paton, Fiona

doi:10.1353/tsl.0.0045

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 27 publications

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“…While Westerns tended to celebrate the heroic virtues of the settlers imagined as embodying the values of the nation as a whole, the codes of Gothic fiction often voiced public fears about internal threats to the body politic. Gothic vocabulary thus pervaded the anxious official rhetoric about communist infiltrators in the speeches of Senator McCarthy and others (Paton , 54). Conversely, in some of the prominent literary works of the period – from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) through William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) – Gothic elements served to criticise the official culture's own paranoia and authoritarian traits: the surveillance of American citizens, insistence on social uniformity and paternal authority (Nadel ).…”

Section: The Tradition Of the Gothic Westernmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cowboys and Vampires

Ladegaard

2015

Orbis Litterarum

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During half of the twentieth century, the socialist states in Eastern and Central Europe functioned as a political Other that helped shape collective identities in the USA. The collapse of the socialist regimes in the early 1990s opened up a new territory for economic, personal and imaginary investments. This territory was soon explored by a number of American novels: John Beckman's The Winter Zoo (2002), Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001), William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003), Arthur Phillips's Prague (2002) and Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002). This article argues that in these novels post‐communist Eastern Europe functions as a region off the symbolic map, a wilderness, often violent, replete with traces of an insistent past. The novels often view the American travellers’ encounters with this landscape through the codes of the American Gothic and Western genres. Thus, the novels frame their investigations of the legacy of authoritarianism, the possibility of cross‐cultural encounters and the consequences of globalisation in literary modes that ultimately refer back to an American cultural tradition and give rise to critical reflections on the formation of American identity after the Cold War.

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Section: The Tradition Of the Gothic Westernmentioning

confidence: 99%