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Overview

Notes

• After World War II, the United States emerged as the strongest world power and assumed the role of speaking on behalf of liberal democratic ideals. »full text
• In the aftermath of the economic and cultural reorganizations of the war, American society became fascinated by cultural homogeneity and political unity. »full text
• The literature of the 1950s reflects the cultural preoccupations with stability and conformity as it responded to the aesthetic project of modernism, which preceded World War II. »full text
• The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 began a dozen years of cultural revolution in which intellectual unrest over the Vietnam War resulted in urban and campus violence, but also gave rise to movements for the betterment of women, blacks, and Native Americans. »full text
• The political divisions, disruptions, and uncertainties of the 1960s were mirrored in the literature of the decade, in which writers came to terms with changing attitudes toward social involvement, government and corporate power, individual and minority rights, drug use, and technological advances like television and consumer air travel that encouraged a global perspective but disrupted normal ways of thinking about time and space. »full text
• After the Vietnam War, Americans voted on their cynicism about government intervention and nostalgia for traditional values by electing Ronald Reagan president in 1980. »full text
• As the Cold War ended, writers worked to broaden the cultural achievements of the 1960s, widening the scope of American experience and casting diversity and plurality as aesthetic ideals. »full text

Full Text

After World War II, the United States emerged as the strongest world power and assumed the role of speaking on behalf of liberal democratic ideals. Having fought until Germany and Japan had unconditionally surrendered, the triumphant Allies attended to their war-ravaged economic infrastructures, but only the United States had the wherewithal to build on its success in the conflict. The overseas empires of Britain and France began to dissolve, often violently. And the Soviet Union, weakened by the German assault of 1941, eventually could not sustain the investment necessary to vie militarily with the Americans. The Cold War (1946–89) between the United States and the USSR involved an ideological struggle between capitalist and communist states worldwide, which erupted into proxy fights in Korea and Vietnam, but eventually confirmed American military preeminence. At home, these political struggles resulted in three major aesthetic reactions. First, the period immediately following World War II was characterized by cultural conformity and nationalist ambition, as artists responded to the Cold War by closing ranks and writing on behalf of an assumed collective identity. Second, in the 1960s and 1970s, the unfulfilled promise of the Kennedy administration along with the turmoil of the Vietnam War prompted cultural introspection, as more and more artists rejected conformity and searched for ways to represent previously excluded minority voices. Third, from the 1980s to the present, artists consolidated the progress made in the previous years, until diversity and inclusivity became aesthetic ideals as well as political goals.

In the aftermath of the economic and cultural reorganizations of World War II, American society became fascinated by cultural homogeneity and political unity. The war effort had shifted industrial production to military ends and recruited women to replace factory workers fighting overseas. When those workers came home, many women found returning to domesticity only temporarily acceptable. Similarly, African Americans who had been drafted into a fully integrated army found their return to second-class citizenship difficult to accept. But for the majority of the 1950s, most Americans dedicated themselves to stability at home in order to bolster the American cause abroad. During the Cold War, American competition with the Soviet Union took the form of political “containment” of the Russians, Chinese, and their satellite states through international organizations like the United Nations (for the Korean War) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (in the case of the Eastern European Warsaw Pact). Once the USSR developed nuclear weapons, both sides formulated policies that favored deterring their adversaries economically rather than deploying the weapons. In light of the struggle between capitalist and socialist economies, Americans treated materialism (which valued wealth as a good in itself) as patriotic. The G.I. Bill, which granted college educations to returning soldiers, ensured a highly skilled workforce, and the developing network of American-owned international corporations resulted in prosperity and the creation of a managerial class. Interstate highways connected suburbs with urban hubs to allow businessmen to shuttle between work and home, but this increased mobility underscored the homogeneity of these interchangeable zones of commerce.

The literature of the 1950s reflects the cultural preoccupations of stability and conformity as it responded to the aesthetic project of modernism. Many artists sought to depict what they took to be common or essential to all Americans regardless of gender, class, ethnicity, or regional identity. Such striving for representativeness derived in part from the grand ambitions of modernist novelists like Ernest Hemingway, whose lingering macho challenge to write the “Great American Novel” pushed writers to universalize or generalize so that their works could speak to any reader. Other novelists were inspired by William Faulkner to use regional specificity to make major statements about race, history, and national identity. By the end of the decade, fiction writers began to suspect that novelistic conventions were inadequate to the task of representing essential Americana, much less contemporary reality. The “Death of the Novel” controversy, as it was called, pointed to the dependence of novels on stable assumptions about character, plot development, and symbolism. During the 1960s, novelists like Philip Roth were increasingly skeptical of such assumptions. Poetry followed a course similar to that of prose in these years. Starting with finely wrought, intricate, personal lyric meditations, which were stylistic holdovers from modernist influences, poets in the Fifties began to experiment with formal openness and thematic inclusiveness of non-mainstream perspectives. Two books that symbolized poetry’s break with modernist form are Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), with its wandering, oral rhythms and energetic rejections of conformity, and Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), featuring a less difficult, more direct style and an autobiographical intensity. Ginsberg’s and Lowell’s works helped prepare for the “confessional” poetry of the 1960s, which stressed the distinctiveness rather than the representativeness of the lyric voice.

The inevitable collision of conformity and individuality was foreshadowed in the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” challenged the prosperous and complacent to provide for the underprivileged and socially marginalized through the desegregation of the South and government programs like the Peace Corps. Many of Kennedy’s civil and voting rights proposals were realized by Lyndon Johnson in the late 1960s as part of his “Great Society.” The assassination of Kennedy in 1963 began a dozen years of cultural revolution in which intellectual unrest over the Vietnam War resulted in urban and campus violence, but also gave rise to movements for the betterment of women, blacks, and Native Americans. The feminist movement, which encouraged women to promote their collective legal, political, and cultural interests, made strides in equality for women not seen since suffrage; similarly, the civil rights movement made advances in awareness and combating racial discrimination, unfinished business since Reconstruction one hundred years earlier. But the good will earned by the Great Society was largely squandered by escalation in Vietnam under Johnson and Nixon and the government’s often deceitful handling of information about Southeast Asia. Cynicism and activism in universities resulted in riots on campuses and deaths at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970; unrest did not cease until Nixon resigned in 1974 under threat of impeachment for abuse of power during the Watergate scandal and American troops withdrew from Vietnam in 1975.

The political divisions, disruptions, and uncertainties of the 1960s were mirrored in the literature of the decade, in which writers came to terms with changing attitudes toward social involvement, government and corporate power, individual and minority rights, drug use, and technological advances like television and consumer air travel that lent themselves to a global perspective but disrupted normal ways of thinking about time and space. The Death of the Novel debates in fiction and the increasingly provisional, momentary nature of poetry emphasized the fragility of language. In literary theory, the school of deconstruction, starting in about 1966, examined the fundamentally unstable quality of all utterances and how any statement depends on often unspoken and arbitrarily constructed assumptions. Still, some writers like the novelists John Updike and Ann Beattie and poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Stanley Kunitz remained committed to realistic description and traditional connections between text and represented world. Others, like those in the “Minimalist” school of prose fiction, labored to create a rigorously believable and philosophically acceptable aesthetic. While some mainly white voices responded to the 1960s by accounting for their aesthetic privilege, others took the decade as an opportunity to add their voices to American ideas of distinctive identity. Large platforms like literary feminism and the Black Arts Movement allowed individual authors to render particular experiences without having to feel they spoke for their race, ethnicity, or gender: Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud were American writers participating in this trend, and Adrienne Rich and Ursula Le Guin are good examples of powerful women writers. In the case of Native American literature, for which historical and cultural contexts did not exist to combat lingering stereotypes, the 1960s saw a parallel movement of critical writings to supplement creative works by Native authors.

After the Vietnam War, Americans voted on their cynicism about government intervention and nostalgia for traditional values by electing Ronald Reagan president in 1980. Reagan presided over the demise of the Soviet Union thanks to a massive buildup in American military spending that the Russians could not match. His economic policies hearkened back to the personal quest for wealth of the 1950s rather than the social activism of the early 1960s. Under Reagan and Clinton, industries downsized and were made more efficient for competition in a globalized marketplace. Instead of a monolithic communist threat, the United States faced a succession of smaller challenges in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and Iraq that it could dispatch handily. The new shape of American influence materialized with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; instead of large states, Americans now face radical fundamentalist cells, and U.S. culture has only begun to respond to this antagonist.

As the Cold War ended, writers worked to broaden the cultural achievements of the 1960s, widening the scope of American experience and casting diversity and plurality as aesthetic ideals. African American women like Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, and Rita Dove wrote in national, racial, and ethnic terms; likewise, Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich succeeded in writing in the often ignored or suppressed tradition of Native American literature. Immigrant writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Jhumpa Lahiri augmented national dialogues of assimilation and ethnic identity for Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Americans. Perhaps the most telling emblem of this contemporary acceptance of new perspectives into conceptions of American experience is the Internet. Online, new hypertext realities need only be imagined to exist virtually, all users may join online communities, and writing exists in open-ended and interactive relationships with its readers.