Chance and design in Cold War American narrative.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation draws attention to the important concept of chance in anti-Communist rhetoric during the early Cold War (1947-1962), when American politicians, intellectuals, social critics, and others argued that totalitarian regimes sanctioned narratives of reality that denied the operation of chance in the world. In works ranging from John Brill's philosophical tract The Chance Character of Human Existence (1956) to Nathan Leites's political and sociological work A Study of Bolshevism (1953), Cold War thinkers identified chance with democracy and the denial of chance with totalitarianism. Because this denial was increasingly proclaimed by American anti-Communists, by the 1950s chance became a politically-loaded term not only for fiction writers, but also for historians, sociologists, and mathematicians on the government payroll. The dissertation thus examines how writers and other intellectuals used chance to generate political critique, and shows how American fiction writers introduced moments of chance---spontaneity, disorder, accidents, linguistic uncertainty---into their narratives as a response to anxieties about totalitarian certainty. Chance and Design in Cold War American Narrative analyzes both novels and non-literary materials that engage with chance. Four principal literary texts anchor the project: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), Jack Kerouac's Visions of Cody (1951), William Gaddis's The Recognitions (1955), and Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe (1952). Close readings of these works are augmented by readings of essays from the period that focus on objectivity in historiography, claims about orthodox sexuality, the defense of "high art" against "middlebrow" and kitsch, and the use of game theory to control the struggle against Communism. The project asks contemporary scholars to reassess the ways we think about post-war culture by arguing that as chance became a politically-loaded term, it became also an important marker of American reality---opposed often to Soviet fictions---during the Cold War.