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The Post-Utopian Imagination American Culture in the Long 1950s
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M. Keith Booker
Book Code: GM2165
ISBN: 0-313-32165-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32165-8
240 pages, N/A
Greenwood Press
Publication: 1/30/2002
List Price: $95.00 (UK Sterling Price: £54.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
Series Title: Contributions to the Study of American Literature
Series Number: 13
Reviews:
  • ...provides enlightening analyses of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and the films of Hitchcock and Disney...for graduate students and above...
    —CHOICE     September 2002
  • [B]ooker's critical analysis of the long 50s is consistently engaging and provocative....[a]cutely perceptive and penetrating.
    —Utopian Studies     2002
  • [B]ooker offers an impressive survey of 1950s culture, high and low, with special attention to how the "end of ideology" debate rippled through diverse realms of cultural production.
    —American Literature     .
Description: In America, the long 1950s were marked by an intense skepticism toward utopian alternatives to the existing capitalist order. This skepticism was closely related to the climate of the Cold War, in which the demonization of socialism contributed to a dismissal of all alternatives to capitalism. This book studies how American novels and films of the long 1950s reflect the loss of the utopian imagination and mirror the growing concern that capitalism brought routinization, alienation, and other dehumanizing consequences. The volume relates the decline of the utopian vision to the rise of late capitalism, with its expanding globalization and consumerism, and to the beginnings of postmodernism. In addition to well-known literary novels, such as Nabokov's Lolita, Booker explores a large body of leftist fiction, popular novels, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney. The book argues that while the canonical novels of the period employ a utopian aesthetic, that aesthetic tends to be very weak and is not reinforced by content. The leftist novels, on the other hand, employ a realist aesthetic but are utopian in their exploration of alternatives to capitalism. The study concludes that the utopian energies in cultural productions of the long 1950s are very weak, and that these works tend to dismiss utopian thinking as naïve or even sinister. The weak utopianism in these works tends to be reflected in characteristics associated with postmodernism.
Table of Contents:
  • Introduction: America as Utopia--Or Not
  • "Soiled, Torn, and Dead": The Bleak Vision of American Literary Fiction of the Long 1950s
  • Un-American Activities: American Realism and the Utopian Imagination in Leftist Fiction of the Long 1950s
  • Monsters, Cowboys, and Criminals: Jim Thompson and the Dark Turn in American Popular Culture in the Long 1950s
  • American Film in the Long 1950s: From Hitchcock to Disney
  • Postscript: Utopia, Postmodernism, and the Cold War
  • Works Cited
  • Index
LC Card Number: 2001050100
LCC Class: PS374
Dewey Class: 813
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