Working from the assumption that someone out there might actually care, here is my first shot at a rough dissertation outline:
I. Introduction
Building from Jeffrey Alexander’s vocabulary (modernization, anti-modernization, post-modernization, neo-modernization), I’ll provide a general overview of Cold War American socio-political trends.
II. Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer
I’ll use Miller (All My Sons through A View from the Bridge) to exemplify modernization — the building of a Cold War liberal consensus — and Mailer (particularly Armies of the Night) for anti-modernization — the rise of the New Left. I had first thought to just treat them quickly in the introduction, but giving them a full chapter will, I hope, more adequately set the stage for the other chapters, which will discuss responses to these two periods.
III. E.L. Doctorow and Robert Coover
These two (The Book of Daniel and The Public Burning) are a natural pairing, which is obvious from much of the critical literature. Both works, in a sense, view modernization and anti-modernization through a postmodern lens. Also helpful to my project is that both The Crucible and Armies of the Night appear as intertexts in Doctorow and Coover.
IV. Ishmael Reed and Tony Kushner
Reed’s The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes, I will argue, are traditionally postmodern texts that clutter up Cold War history in order to offer a left critique of neo-modernization — the triumph of capitalism and neoconservatism. Kushner’s Angels in America is similar in that respect. This chapter will deal mostly with the Reagan/Bush years. I think that Reed’s concern with race/class and Kushner’s concern with sexuality, along with their shared frustration with the hypocrisy of America’s “moral majority,” makes them an interesting pairing and a good avenue into neo-modernization.
V. Don DeLillo and Philip Roth
I’m thinking of subtitling this chapter, “Epic History.” It’s interesting that, as the millennium approached, two of America’s premiere novelists set out to wrap their hands around the whole of the second half of the twentieth century. I’ll be dealing mostly with Underworld, American Pastoral, and I Married a Communist. At this point, this chapter remains the biggest mystery to me. I’m not sure what, if anything, they’ve accomplished, other than aestheticizing an impossible task: the writing of a coherent and comprehensive American Cold War narrative. The political implications are interesting and troubling and confusing to me.
VI. Conclusion
As I’ve yet to discover the main point of my project, I don’t know what my conclusion will be. But, like many intellectuals right now, I guess I’m interested in trying to figure out what’s next. I’m thinking of using Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul as a jumping off point. Obviously, it would deviate from my Cold War history emphasis, but it seems to be a logical next step after I have spent so many pages discussing the rhetorical formation of American liberalism. Social theorists have been saying for years that “totalitarianism,” “nationalism,” and “fundamentalism” would replace “communism” as the Other against which America defines itself. I can’t think of a better study than Afghanistan.