The Uninteresting Majority: Post-Realist Fiction and the Masculine Archetype in 1950s America
Abstract
“The Uninteresting Majority” is a study of postwar American realist fiction written in the immediate postwar era and about the Second World War and the decade, the 1950s, that immediately followed it. The study views this period, and the novels under examination, as “post-realist.” The study defines post-realism as a way of defining reality only in terms of the present. In post-realism the past is wilfully ignored in favour of an all-encompassing present. It creates in effect a simulacrum of reality that simultaneously exists because of the past (especially in terms of the Depression and the war) and somehow in spite of it. “The Uninteresting Majority” observes how this post-realist effect is manifested in literature and how this distinctive way of viewing reality shapes not only past representations of the decade, but current ones as well.
The focal point for both this study and the era as a whole is the archetypal middle-class white male American. It is his transition from soldier and licensed killer in wartime to family man and corporate employee in peacetime, a transition that suggests much dissonance, that sparks the post-realist attempt to foreclose the past. This study’s sections examine different representations of post-realism. The first focuses on texts that suggest its formation during wartime, where the Army’s indifference towards an individual’s background suggests an erasure of the past. The second finds texts that wholeheartedly embrace post-realism as a paradigm, suggesting that history only matters in terms of how it justifies the present. The third examines texts that reject the post-realist ideal and its focus only on present prosperity. The final section, on the television program Mad Men, discusses how the idea of post-realism shapes our current understanding of the 1950s as a period.
Description
Keywords
Literature, Literature--American, History--United States
Citation
Kriz, M. (2016). The Uninteresting Majority: Post-Realist Fiction and the Masculine Archetype in 1950s America (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28406