Paranoia, Politics, and the Popular Imagination: Conspiracy in Contemporary American Literature PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Paranoia, Politics, and the Popular Imagination: Conspiracy in Contemporary American Literature PDF full book. Access full book title Paranoia, Politics, and the Popular Imagination: Conspiracy in Contemporary American Literature by Ingrid Walker Fields. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Ingrid Walker Fields
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Ingrid Walker Fields
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Samuel Chase Coale
Publisher:
ISBN: 0817359508
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Richard Hofstadter
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307388441
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Get Book Here
Book Description
This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.
Author: Ingrid Walker Fields
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 440
Get Book Here
Book Description
"The postmodern American novel is acutely concerned with conspiracy theory as a form of narrative and political authority. In the works of Pynchon, Doctorow, Atwood and DeLillo, conspiracy emerges as the focal point of public memory and social resistance. This study traces conspiracy as a literary metaphor for a transformation in the American national identity, from a public besieged with internal enemies to one which identifies its own government as the internal enemy. Against these dynamics, narrative memory in the postmodern novel becomes a means of reconstructing and authorizing the political, personal and historical self. I identify three periods in this century's construction of conspiracy narratives: we have moved from a government-authorized narrative to a popular response to this narrative, back to the social text of this conspiracy dialectic, in search of a comprehensive construct"--Leaf iv
Author: Peter Knight
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814747353
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Get Book Here
Book Description
An intriguing interrogation of America’s long-running obsession with conspiracy theories Why are Americans today so fascinated by Area 51? How did rumors that the AIDS virus originated as a weapon of biowarfare emerge? Why does the Kennedy assassination provoke heated debate over fifty years after the fact, and why did Donald Trump’s birther theories only serve to increase his popularity with voters? The origins of these ideas reveal important facets of American culture and politics. Placing conspiracy thinking at the center of American history, and challenging the knee-jerk dismissal of conspiratorial thought as deluded and often dangerous, Conspiracy Nation provides a wide-ranging survey of conspiracy theories in contemporary America. In the 19th century, inflammatory rhetoric about slave revolts, the well-publicized specter of the black rapist, and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan all worked as conspiracy theories to legitimate an emerging sense of national consciousness based on an ideology of white supremacy – one that still persists today. In our contemporary world, panicked responses to increasing multiculturalism and globalization yield new notions of victimhood and new theories about conspiratorial plans for global domination. Offering up a provocative array of examples, ranging from alien abduction to the novels of DeLillo and Pynchon to Tupac Shakur's "paranoid style," Conspiracy Nation documents and unearths the workings of conspiracy in the contemporary moment. Contributors: Clare Birchall, Jack Bratich, Bridget Brown, Jodi Dean, Ingrid Walker Fields, Douglas Kellner, Peter Knight, Fran Mason, John A. McClure, Timothy Melley, Eithne Quinn, and Skip Willman
Author: Timothy Melley
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501713000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Get Book Here
Book Description
Why, Timothy Melley asks, have paranoia and conspiracy theory become such prominent features of postwar American culture? In Empire of Conspiracy, Melley explores the recent growth of anxieties about thought-control, assassination, political indoctrination, stalking, surveillance, and corporate and government plots. At the heart of these developments, he believes, lies a widespread sense of crisis in the way Americans think about human autonomy and individuality. Nothing reveals this crisis more than the remarkably consistent form of expression that Melley calls "agency panic"—an intense fear that individuals can be shaped or controlled by powerful external forces. Drawing on a broad range of forms that manifest this fear—including fiction, film, television, sociology, political writing, self-help literature, and cultural theory—Melley provides a new understanding of the relation between postwar American literature, popular culture, and cultural theory. Empire of Conspiracy offers insightful new readings of texts ranging from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to the Unabomber Manifesto, from Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders to recent addiction discourse, and from the "stalker" novels of Margaret Atwood and Diane Johnson to the conspiracy fictions of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Kathy Acker. Throughout, Melley finds recurrent anxieties about the power of large organizations to control human beings. These fears, he contends, indicate the continuing appeal of a form of individualism that is no longer wholly accurate or useful, but that still underpins a national fantasy of freedom from social control.
Author: Steffen Hantke
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN:
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Get Book Here
Book Description
Under the influence of Thomas Pynchon, a generation of postmodern American writers has explored the theme of conspiracy and paranoia, its origins in contemporary American culture, and its political and ideological ramifications. This intense preoccupation with paranoid forms of conceptual organization has helped critics to represent postmodernism as a coherent phenomenon and define it as a period. While for many readers the assumption of periodic homogeneity is still valid, postmodern fiction has, in fact, been diversifying rapidly in the course of its development over the last 20 years. In the works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy, a new set of narrative premises, which mark a significant paradigmatic shift within postmodern American fiction, has begun to emerge from the dialogic interplay with Pynchonesque paranoia.
Author: Jesse Walker
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062383221
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333
Get Book Here
Book Description
A comprehensive history and analysis of the origins, evolution, and current life, legacy, and impact of conspiracy theories in American culture and politics, from the colonial era to today. Conspiracies have been woven through America’s social tapestry since the beginning of its history. The United States of Paranoia is a unique and fascinating look at how these commonly held beliefs—true or not—have helped shape the American cultural imagination. Using examples from colonial times to today, Jesse Walker makes the compelling argument that paranoia doesn’t just exist on the fringe of society, but is at the core of our national identity. Walker doesn’t focus on proving or disproving a particular theory. Synthesizing intensive archival research in a pulp fiction narrative, he explores the myths that haunt our nation, breaking them into five distinct categories: The Enemy Outside, The Enemy Within, The Enemy Above, The Enemy Below, and The Benevolent Conspiracy. From J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to Watergate, the “Matrix” phenomenon to the Birthers, Walker reveals how national myths have influenced our lives, including our view of ourselves and our government. He also identifies and explores the little-recognized rise of a subculture obsessed not with one single myth or another, but in the notion of the conspiracy phenomenon itself. This growing obsession, Walker attests, offers profound insight into what it means to be American. Provocative, well-reasoned, and utterly compelling, the United States of Paranoia will make you rethink the world and the nation in a new and different way.
Author: Keith A. Livers
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487536127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Get Book Here
Book Description
Contemporary Russia stands apart as one of the most prolific generators of conspiracy theories and paranoid rhetoric. Conspiracy Culture traces the roots of the phenomenon within the sphere of culture and history, examining the long arc of Russian paranoia from the present moment back to earlier nineteenth-century sources, such as Dostoevsky’s anti-nihilist novel Demons. Conspiracy Culture examines the use of conspiracy tropes by contemporary Russian authors and filmmakers including the postmodernist writer Viktor Pelevin, the conservative author and pundit Aleksandr Prokhanov, and the popular director Timur Bekmambetov. It also explores paranoia as an instrument within contemporary Russian political rhetoric, as well as in pseudo-historical works. What stands out is the manner in which popular paranoia is utilized to express broadly shared fears not only of a long-standing anti-Russian conspiracy undertaken by the West, but also about the destruction of the country’s cultural and spiritual capital within this imagined "Russophobic" plot.
Author: Luke Ritter
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040041299
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Get Book Here
Book Description
This important collection explores the social effects of popular American conspiratorial beliefs, featuring the work of 22 scholars representing multiple academic disciplines. This book aims to better understand the phenomenon of American conspiracism by investigating how people acquire their beliefs, how conspiratorial stories function in politics and society, the role of conspiracy theories in the formation of national identities, and what conspiratorial beliefs mean to individual believers. Topics include QAnon, the Boogaloo Boys, the satanic panic, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination, the Great Replacement Theory, anti-Catholic nativism, Flat Earth belief, Elvis Lives, COVID-19 denial, and much more. Each essay is accessibly and engagingly written without compromising quality. American Conspiracism is essential reading for students of psychology, political science, and U.S. history, as well as journalists, independent researchers, and anyone interested in American conspiracies.
