Empire of conspiracy, the culture of paranoia in postwar America, Timothy Melley
Type
Label
Empire of conspiracy, the culture of paranoia in postwar America, Timothy Melley
Language
eng
Index
no index present
Literary Form
non fiction
Main title
Empire of conspiracy
Nature of contents
dictionaries
Responsibility statement
Timothy Melley
Series statement
Cornell paperbacks
Sub title
the culture of paranoia in postwar America
Summary
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
Target audience
adult
Classification
Creator
Genre
Subject
- Popular culture -- United States
- Paranoia -- United States -- History -- 20th century
- Social problems in literature
- Conspiracies -- United States -- History -- 20th century
- American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
- Electronic books
- United States -- Civilization -- 1945-
- Paranoia in literature
- Conspiracies -- United States
- Conspiracies in literature
- Political fiction, American + History and criticism
- Politics and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century
- Paranoia -- United States
- Political sociology
Content
Is Derivative Of
Incoming Resources
- Has instance1
Outgoing Resources
- Classification1
- Creator1
- Genre1
- Subject14
- Popular culture -- United States
- Paranoia -- United States -- History -- 20th century
- Social problems in literature
- Conspiracies -- United States -- History -- 20th century
- American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
- Electronic books
- United States -- Civilization -- 1945-
- Paranoia in literature
- Conspiracies -- United States
- Conspiracies in literature
- Political fiction, American + History and criticism
- Politics and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century
- Paranoia -- United States
- Political sociology
- Content1
- Is Derivative Of1