Nomadic Resistance: Postwar Literature and the Formation of a Transatlantic Counterculture.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This project investigates the imagined political potentials of nomadic subjectivity in the transatlantic literary landscape directly following the Second World War. The figure of the nomad played an integral role in the counter-cultural imaginary of the 1960s and, while it has received extensive attention in terms of postmodernism, an examination of its postwar literary roots will allow for better understanding of its generativity and restrictiveness in both political and cultural terms. While this project is situated within the realm of American Studies, in that it ultimately focuses on American writers and texts, it also seeks to re-establish the transatlantic culture within which these texts were produced---a culture which was grappling with the relationship between art and ideology in the shared wake of the Second World War. At the same time, by concentrating on writers who were, to varying degrees, nomadic, I will explore the relationship between movement and subjectivity through an analysis of their fictional nomads.
This project arises from several intertwining questions: first, how does the figuration of nomadic subjectivity for this generation of writers reconcile the relationship between the liberatory aims of an individual's movement and the social engagement required for larger political movements? Secondly, how do conceptualizations of the cross-cultural encounter in this literature, written in the shadow of a war predicated on ideals of racial, national, and ideological purity, allow for the emergence of a rhetoric that celebrates multiculturalism and hybridity? Thirdly, how can contemporary theories of nomadic subjectivity allow scholars in American Studies to move beyond the exceptionalist narrative of the "American Century" as they evaluate the literature of the postwar, or early Cold War, era? Conversely, what value do these texts, which vibrate with the tension between hope and despair as they approach the cross-cultural encounter, have to offer theories that act as a heuristic for understanding our increasingly globalized world?.