Decades

1900-1920: new infusions of deterministic theories, (Freudianism, Marxism) revitalize the interest in
Darwin and Spencer; new theories of relativity and uncertainty (Einstein, Planck) encourage fresh
enquiry into the definition of civilization and culture undertaken by the new science of anthropology.
1904 Roosevelt elected president; 1906 Sinclair publishes The Jungle; 1907 William James
publishes Pragmatism
1910s: if revolt dominated the 20s, convention dominated the decade before. Reacting to rapid
technological and social change, adherents believed that they were the apostles of moral
improvement. Conservative leaders saw themselves as the architects of a new religious reformation,
more Protestant than Catholic in character, but going beyond the spiritual and ecclesiastical to
secular affairs. Those leaders, churchmen for the most part, gradually turned Congress into their
instrument. Conservative political lobbies persuaded Congress to pass the Mann Act in 1910,
outlawing interstate prostitution, and the Volstead Act in 1917, prohibiting the manufacture and sale
of alcohol. The forces fighting for convention made the paternalistic family their social model. They
fought against giving the vote to women. Aid to the poor and unemployed was considered to be
largely a personal matter than a public responsibility. In foreign policy conservatives were patriots;
their patriotism was buttressed by the belief that the global mission of America was somehow
divinely supported, a view stemming from the Puritans original conviction of mission and
reinforced through the doctrine of manifest destiny in th2 19th century. The political leader of this
ideological group was Woodrow Wilson, elected president in 1912. He systematically stressed the
moral element in public policy. He addressed himself to the average man, and for him new freedom
meant freedom from the tyranny of big business, especially the trusts. In foreign policy, after WW I
started, he tried to keep the US out of war; entering the war, he declared that America was fighting to
make the world safe for democracy (1917), trying to turn the war into a crusade. After the war,
writers begin to express their doubts about the validity of democratic government, of organized
religion; they attack patriotism; male dominance is questioned (1920, women suffrage). 1911landmark: George Santayana delivers his address The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy. By
attributing to the genteel tradition the attributes of weakness, passivity, non-participation in the life
of the nation, domesticity, a decorative function, he draws attention to the threat that such a tradition
poses to an authentic intellectual life. Brooks Americas Coming of Age, 1915: there is no middleground between the two attitudes of mind: highbrow and lowbrow in American culture, gap
between great ideals and money pursuit. 1917 America enters World War I, (president Wilson).
1919- Volstead Act
The 1920s: modernism and defensiveness
1920 feminism comes of age: in 1920, women suffrage is ratified; they had legal and political
sanction for the use of their abilities in the political sphere. The Defense of Women is published
(Mencken, 1922)
Writers such as: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, E. Pound, G. Stein resent Americas
materialism, provincialism and puritanism, spend time in post-war Europe (avant-garde experiment).
They break with the genteel tradition and make Modernism the second flowering of American
literature. 1920s the riotous, crazy 20s, the Jazz age (Fitzgerald), a response meant to shock, born
of skepticism and loss of faith in an age of prosperity which minimized the need for change. The 20s
were years of prosperity, standardized mass-production of consumer goods, the automobile boom,
electrification, electrical appliances- great social and cultural impact, transformed US into a
consumer society. Contradictory character of the 20s: clash between the modern experimental ideas
thriving on the technological advancement and the contact with Europe, and the puritanical
conservatism and isolationism of the business civilization. The defensive mood of the 1920s was a
wish for reassurance, a wish to believe in the traditional American values and, at the same time, an

expression of the resistance to change. In the Jazz Age, there is a revolt against traditional values; at
the other extreme, the forces of Puritanism remained active; they constituted a minority, but a
substantial one. They considered their movement as a fresh fundamentalism, a new Reformation; the
resurgence of creationism indicates the renaissance of religious convention. The most dramatic
confrontation of creationism against science came in 1925 with the trial of a biology teacher in
Tennessee for teaching evolution in schools (the monkey trial). The libertarians, led by
intellectuals such as Mencken, opposed this fundamentalism.1924- racism (Ku Klux Klan)
Prohibition turned into a source of illegal fortune, corruption, crime. 1928 Hoover elected president
(Republican); he advocated a minimum of regulations for business, stressed the responsibilities of
local governments as opposed to the federal one. In October 1929, the Great Depression begins.
As far as American Studies is concerned: 1920s peak in the interest in American civilization, since
after war America stood in a new relation with the world and with her own past. Scholars and
historians like Turner, Brooks, Arthur Schlesinger aim to recover the heritage of a usable past and
identify the American tradition. A. Schlesinger: History of American Life Series. The proliferation of
studies about American civilization at home was paralleled by a similar phenomenon abroad, as after
the war US had emerged as an active participant in the world leadership.
1927 was a landmark in the growth of the idea of American civilization and the rise of American
Studies: Charles & Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, and Parrington, Main Currents
in American Thought. Parrington brings together history and literature, to develop a paradigm of
Americas experience, an intellectual history synthesis. The idea of civilization informing
Parringtons discourse was a unitary holistic one. This idea developed a rhetoric of consensus
based on the belief in American myth.
1922- Eliot published The Waste Land; Lewis publishes Babbitt; 1925 Fitzgerald, The Great
Gatsby; 1926 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; 1927 Parrington, Beard; 1928 Hoover elected
president; October 1929 Stock Market crash (beginning of the Great Depression, 1929- 1933)
The 1930s: restoration of confidence; early institutionalization of American Civilization
The Great Depression takes place, the belief in the American Dream is low; anxiety over the
American economic system and the values it rested on: individualism, self-reliance, self-sufficiency.
1930 the agrarians (a group of Southern intellectuals) attack industrialism. Presidents Hoover
philosophy of individualism could not prevent business stagnation; the Depression and its effects
which lingered on throughout the 30s, wrought a fundamental change in the American political,
social and economic thought. 1932 Roosevelt elected president, 1933- beginning of the New Deal
providing work, health care, old-age insurance; the bulk of responsibility was carried by the federal
government (Industry Recovery Act, Unemployment Relief Act, Home Owners Loan Act,
Agricultural Adjustment Administration, etc); 1936 Roosevelt re-elected. Roosevelts New Deal
demonstrated the need for government interference; the collective purpose it created radicalized
many American intellectuals (1930s were called the red decade). Artists and writers started to view
their mission in social and political terms: Steinbeck exposed the abuses and corruption of the big
capital, Sinclair Lewis, Dos Passos explore the not so beautiful hidden face of American society.
Many writers contribute to magazines encouraging Marxist views. Rather than a commitment to the
communist ideology, this meant a transfer of artistic loyalty from the products of social elites to
those supposedly truer to the aspirations of people. The mid-30s see a reorientation of culture toward
a more positive appraisal of American life and experience recovery of confidence in the American
democracy, and growing interest in American music, art, and people, as a result of Roosevelts
successful New Deal reforms, and of the looming threat of Stalinism and fascism in Europe. A
national self-discovery, heightened interest in the nations usable past and the reassessment of
American civilization: many new scholars and historians contribute to American Studies. Late 30s
saw a more mature self-consciousness of the nation. 1933-38: influx of refugee radical European

intellectuals, especially Jews, contribute to the quality of intellectual thought. The role of the radical
intellectuals in the restoration of confidence in American democracy cannot be underestimated.
In the inter-war years, the rise of American Studies movement is closely connected to the general
tendency of radicalization and cultural criticism, as well as with the leading position of the US and
the growth of modern universities. The advent of American Studies (American Civilization as it was
then called) in American universities (1930s) was the response of the humanities to the challenge of
interdisciplinarity. Robert Spiller the institutional founder of American studies explains the
institutionalization of American Civilization as the concurrence of the need of a radical re-evaluation
of the past, on one hand, and the indispensable need for an interdisciplinary approach, which alone
could provide a holistic understanding of American culture and contribute to a liberal education, by
fighting excessive departmentalism. It was an expression of discontent with academic formalism; the
movement toward disciplinary integration started in late 20s and early 30s with American literature
and history. American Studies Movement acted as a catalyst of all efforts to define America, and up
to the 1960s it found its identity mainly in the systematic attempts to fuse the literary and historical
domains, so as to find meaning in the American experience.
The American Mind (1937), anthology of American writing, a milestone in American Studies, by
Gabriel Williams, was used by early courses at Yale and other universities. In 1933, Yale awarded a
first Ph.D. for an American Studies-like dissertation. The first interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in the
History of American Civilization was inaugurated at Harvard in 1936. By 1939 programs on
American Civilization were offered by 6 universities; the movement was getting under way without a
clear theoretical and methodological direction; instead, it had a well-defined goal, to make American
past intellectually usable and to facilitate a unitary understanding of American civilization.
By the end of the 1930s, Parringtons approach (materialist interpretation of literature as merely an
illustration of history, treatment of ideas as subservient to reality) began to be questioned. Perry
Miller and Matthiessen (historian and cultural critic) produced works which marked the future course
of American Studies movement. Perry Miller endeavors to interpret the Puritan origins of American
Civilization by reconstructing the Puritan thought and the relation between intellect and piety like
Parrington, he attempts to find a usable past for the present and future, by recovering the truth
about the Puritans and their essential contribution to shaping the American character and culture (e.g.
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century 1939); however, he fails to integrate
successfully the literary with the social and historical. Matthiessens American Renaissance (1941)
also aims at recovering the usable past; he analyses the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman,
Hawthorne, Melville, both form the point of view of textual analysis and from interdisciplinary
social and cultural perspectives extrinsic to the literary work. Drawing upon the experience of
interdisciplinary teaching and the liberalism and radicalism of the 1930s, Miller and Matthiessen
construct a more comprehensive paradigm for the study of American civilization, which will
dominate American Studies up to the mid-60s.
1939: Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath shows the very poor, victims of the depression, being helped
clumsily but compassionately- but persons not much better off themselves. Steinbeck depicts a
compassion strengthened by a basic respect for human dignity. Adamics article Thirty Million New
Americans (1934) speaks in favor of ethnicity, showing that the diverse racial and cultural
backgrounds will enrich the civilization and deepen the culture of America. 1936 Dos Passos
publishes Big Money; the portrait of Henry Ford furnishes a key to Americas industrial strengths
and weaknesses. Sit-down strikes occur, such as the one at General Motors in 1937 (manifestation of
American labor radicalism). With the aid of the New Deal, a class made of blue-collar workers
emerges to compete with the middle class (The Challenge of the Middle Class, by W. White, 1937);
it finds in democratic unions the way to solidarity, self-respect, and a living wage. The old craft
unions had been elitist, the new, democratic ones enlisted everyone. 1936 Dale Carnegie: How to
Win Friends and Influence People, a success manual, a model of American optimism (appealed to
the middle class), showing that in spite of the Depression, many Americans believed that, through

will and energy, they could achieve a rewarding life. Conditions improved at the end of the decade,
as during the late 30s the US became affected by the growing political tensions in Europe and started
preparing for WW II. 1939 Lipmanns article The Indispensable Opposition about the freedom of
speech and opinion. 1931 ONeill, Mourning Becomes Electra; Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom; Dos
Passos, Big Money; 1939 Miller: The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, and Steinbeck,
Grapes of Wrath; World War II begins.
1940s, 1950s- the decades of the consensus; baby-boom: Post World War II, US emerged with a
strong military potential, economy ready for further expansion, new awareness of its strength.
Americans felt confident in their nations future, had a sense of national unity and superiority. The
war and its Cold War aftermath revived the American Dream, resurrected the sense of mission.
There is a democratic revival. A powerful discourse of democracy is expressed by a great many
writings, in early 1940s, all sharing the same holistic, organic view of American civilization and
ascribing to the idea of democracy the central role in its making. The terms civilization and
democracy overlap to the point where they become indistinguishable. The spirit of special mission
in which the US approached their involvement in world affairs rendered the search for cultural
identity instrumental in proving Americas exceptionalism. There is a gradual shift of emphasis from
American history to American experience, from intellectual to cultural history - incipient tendency
in the American Studies of the late 1940s.
1941- America enters WW II. 1945 Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill confer in Yalta. 1946 Baby
Boom generation (term introduced by Dr. Spock). 1948 Faulkners most significant novel on race
relations, Intruder in the Dust, voices the Southern resentment toward the pious pronouncements of
the North.
The Cold War (phrase first used in 1947 by Churchill) was a struggle between two conflicting
ideologies: the democratic and the totalitarian communist. The post-war defense spending
contributed to steady economic growth and the rise of such industries as electronics, aviation and
chemicals; at the same time, America took upon herself great responsibilities in the world-wide
system of defensive alliances. The anti-communist crusade was energized (age of hysteria over
communist infiltration); the New Deal liberalism lost its grip on the American people. The Cold War
made imperative a national consensus, built on affluence and self-glory as well as on fear and
insecurity. At the general level of society, affluence and consensus tended to blur class distinctions
and conflicts; at the level of culture, affluence widened the gap between mass and high culture, while
the consensus energized the search for a national character to explain Americas uniqueness. The
development of mass media contributed to a process of massification of culture, accompanied by
cultural implosion and anti-intellectual acquiescence. Paradoxically, Americans were the best
informed people on Earth, for literacy was almost universal and there was a TV set in every home,
but at the same time they were ill informed because of the low level of what they saw, heard, read in
media. Mass culture became solely an article of mass consumption. There appeared a gradual
homogenization of high and mass culture. Most intellectuals enjoy the age of affluence, a few
hesitate between acceptance and rejection of the system: Bellows Seize the Day (1956), Ellisons
Invisible Man (1952). 1950s: the tranquilized fifties, the uncommitted generation or the silent
generation, found new modes of expression in a teenage culture worshipping rock and roll and a
host of other cults and fashions. Salingers The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is a diagnosis of the 1950s,
an account of the predicament of a generation unable to give an answer, confused about its aims and
means. The crisis of American liberalism in the 50s is rooted in liberals failure to question the
cultural consensus and recontextualize the meaning of Americanism.
1951 C. Wright Mills publishes White Collar; He deals with the whole range of the middle class.
He widens the standard sociological definition of the middle class, to take in the multitude of
workers and clerks, male and female, who literally or figuratively wear a white collar on the job.
Although the mainstay of the middle class remains the bourgeois businessman so tellingly satirized

in Sinclair Lewiss Babbitt, Mills augments his Babbitts with the many persons like Babbitts
secretary Miss McGoun and Babbitts salesman Stan Graf. Mills sees the class as a whole growing in
importance. 1953 The Lonely Crowd, by Riesman, Glazer and Denney suggests a typology of the
middle class, showing that with the other-directed type of the first half of the 20th century,
competition for personal success generated a vague but pervasive dissatisfaction that turned the
Americans into a lonely crowd. 1955 the observations of Mills and Riesman are illustrated by the
realistic fiction: 1955- Wilsons The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, which focused on the malaise of
the middle class. 1954 Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark legal decision
establishing equal opportunity in the public sphere for all Americans. 1956 Ginsbergs Howl a
jeremiad of hate and anger against American capitalism; 1957- On the Road, by Kerouac helped to
crystallize the meaning of beat as beatific. 1955 RWB Lewis, The American Adam
American Studies focused on the quest for the American character and the identification of those
patterns of ideas and values that account for the uniqueness of people. The Cold War curriculum in
American Civilization in the 50s was centered on the question Whats American about America?
The growing interest in sociology gave rise to a new sociological mode of thinking which was
applied to humanistic fields, including literature. The sociological imagination dominated the
period ever since the publication in 1953 of The Lonely Crowd. A Study of the Changing American
Character by Riesman, Denney and Glazer. Riesman singled out three types of social character and
behavior: tradition-directed, inner-directed and other-directed; the book is a revision of American
individualism as it has been expressed historically by the inner-directed character, the prevailing
American type, shaped in the early stages of capitalism by the Protestant work ethic; in a consumer
society, this type has been replaced by the other-directed character, the man who obeys from without
rather than from within, a conformist. C. Wright Mills made a critical re-appraisal of the American
concept of individualism and democracy in the white-collar world of the little man (the hired
employee) in White Collar: The American Middle Classes, describing America as the great
Salesroom inhabited by a confused and vacillating middle-class. Mills little man leaves the
dangerous mark of his conformity and aimlessness upon American life. As the decade of 1950s
draws to a close, criticism of mass-society becomes more radical. The Beat Movement a pun on the
word beat expressing both exhaustion and beatitude - (around 1956) is a manifestation of revived
radicalism. It included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, who voiced their loss of faith in the values of
the commercial world by rejecting conventions. Also, the 50s see a revival of interest in behaviorism
and psychoanalysis. Behaviorism (human personality is highly conditioned by the experience of the
body in a particular environment) had a great impact on the Age of Affluence. It created an ethic of
permissiveness which concealed the collapse of traditional values and moral judgments. The notion
of sex as behaviour appears; behaviourism was also applied to culture, politics, linguistics, etc; the
behaviourism of the American novel between the two World Wars is resurrected in the postmodern
novel of late 50s and 60s, with John Barth (The End of the Road, 1958) and Thomas Pynchon.
The 50s in psychoanalysis starting with the same dissatisfaction with American life in the age of
affluence - interpret human behavior in the light of inner stimuli; post-Freudian psychoanalysis
emphasizes the problems of inauthentic existence (mans existential predicament). A massive
infusion of existentialism takes place in the 1950s, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus influence the fiction of
John Barth, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, where an alienated protagonist searches for identity, even
though he grows increasingly aware of the tragic human condition.
1940s, 1950s: post-war institutional expansion and the internationalization of American Studies. In
the late 40s, the formative period (Spiller): 1947, Literary History of the United States published.
By 1947 more than 60 institutions in US offered undergraduate studies in the field, 15 offered Ph. D
or MA. Many call their programs American Studies rather than American civilization. In the 50s
Cold War and affluence brought big amounts of money in the movement; as a result, rapid
expansion. A parallel process of institutional expansion takes place overseas, reflecting Americas
status of superpower and its own interest in self-discovery, also the concern after 1945 to create a

favorable American image world-wide. 1947- landmark in the internationalization of American

Studies, the Fulbright program began.
From the cultural point of view, the desire of the 50s to create an aesthetic of silence, as in the
plays of Samuel Beckett or the music of John Cage.
1960s: the explosive sixties: civil rights movement, cultural explosion, revival of feminism and
the new sexual politics, youth rebellion and counterculture, cultural radicalism, the matrix of
Postmodernism
The 60s opened with the promise of energy and change contained in Kennedys New Frontier
doctrine (frontier of unknown opportunities and perils); later on, (after the Vietnam War), many
would detect an imperialist stance in the idealism of the New Frontier. Kennedys assassination
(1963) and Lyndon Johnsons failure to create the Great Society shattered the consensus and
generated a deep crisis of confidence. By 1968, the most troubled year of the decade, the isolated
anti-war protests turned into impressive mass demonstrations, such as the Peace March on the
Pentagon (1967) described by Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night.
Civil rights movement and cultural explosion: the widening gap between liberal assumptions and a
shockingly contradicting reality led to a loss of confidence, to the collapse of consensus and also
encouraged a radical consciousness of belonging to a particular minority (race, sex, age, nonconformity), especially ethnic and racial self-consciousness: people who know they are outsiders,
and think of themselves as others: Jews, blacks, Catholics, students, etc. The civil-rights movement
and the opposition to the Vietnam war brought together these minorities, radicalized and politicized
their protests, process best illustrated by the shift of the black movement from non-violent
integration to black nationalism and back to Africa program formulated by Malcolm X. A series
of city riots took place, despite the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). The
black movement became one of the main shaping forces in the decade.
The revival of feminism and the new sexual politics: the social activism stirred a new spirit of
feminism, particularly among middle-class women. In 1966, the National Organization for Women
(NOW) was founded; it aimed at ending gender and job discrimination, giving women the place they
deserve in the social, political, economic life. The feminist movement, Womens Liberation
Movement (Womens Lib) became more popular thanks to Betty Friedans Feminine Mistique
(1963), a feminist manifesto and a call for feminist self-awareness. Kate Milletts theory of sexual
politics advocated the necessity of a gradual change in the social attitudes towards women and
claimed their access to positions in the government, police, industry, science, finance. By 1970
Womens Studies had become an area of interdisciplinary investigation.
Youth rebellion was expressed in powerful political action or in a shocking counterculture. The
baby-boom generation (4 times more numerous than any previous one) reached the college age in
the 60s. The SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) founded in 1960, Free Speech Movement
(1964) fought for students rights, antiwar crusade. The New Left was described as the core of the
movement. The radicalization of student movement reached a climax in 1968, when about 100
campuses joined the demonstrations and strikes against war and racism. Reasons which led to
student upheavals: iconoclasm (the wish to undermine the total fabric of American life), the effects
of Vietnam war, the ennui (too much money and time) and the failure of the bureaucratic
multiversity to bridge the gap between what they studied and the lives they wished to live. To
bridge this gap, they looked to a counterculture meant to defy the Establishment by nonconformist
behavior, such as that of the hippies: sex, drugs, Oriental mysticism, life in the communes; a
counterculture which, by preaching love, peace and freedom, made everything permissible; also
marked by excess, violence (culmination in 1969, with outdoor music festivals). Student radicalism
did not survive the decade; it was the first generation not to be primarily interested in amassing
great amount of wealth as a life goal.

Social change and intellectual climate: 1962 Illustrated by Ken Keseys One Flew Over the
Cuckoos Nest, the image of a sick society, controlled by an oppressive authority, proliferated all
through the 60s. Based on rejection of all kinds of external authority, the need for radical
transformation of society and culture determined a dramatic change not only in the social and
cultural realms, but also in the intellectual climate. The problem of mans alienation and the fate of
humanistic values in contemporary American society is tackled by Goodman in Growing Up Absurd
(1960), and a more philosophical approach by the Frankfurt School, whose representatives
(Wilhelm Reich for whom culture was the most dangerous form of repression, a view which
influenced the Beat movement; Marcuse: the repressive integration induced by affluence in a
consumer society maim the individual) had come to America in the 1930s and 40s, under the threat
of Nazi authoritarism. Their philosophical, social and cultural anthropology combined revised
versions of Marx, Hegel and Freud in an attempt to develop a critical theory on contemporary
American society and to find solutions for mans liberation from psychic, social, cutural and politic
repressions. They influenced writers like Norman OBrown: Life Against Death (1959) and Loves
Body (1960), apology for instinctive life.
Effects on culture of science and technology: the spectacular developments of science and
technology: uses of atomic energy, a Space Program whose goal was attained in 1969 by the mission
of Apollo 11 Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. McLuhans The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962),
Understanding Media (1964), Culture is our Business (1970) study the incipient stages of the
emerging information society, with the idea of the world transformed into a global village, utopian
dream of organic unity which man can attain through technology. Buckminster Fullers books also
construct a daring image of the future. However, many considered the technological development a
dehumanizing force, a threat to culture and traditional humanistic values, a danger to environment.
Mumford (cultural historian) saw the main danger in giving priority to the machine rather than to the
human value it contains. He speaks of the mega-machine represented by government, corporate
business or computerization. Kurt Vonnegut (Cats Cradle, 1963, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969),
Pynchon (V, 1963), Mailer are examples of the way in which the literary mind responded to the new
challenge of science and technology.
Cultural radicalism often borrowed attitudes from political radicalism, and vice-versa. According
to Daniel Bell, the characteristic features of cultural radicalism in the 60s were: 1) a concern with
violence of cruelty (echoing the political and social violence of the decade); films, such as Bonnie
and Clyde, happenings, paintings, were saturated with violence; 2) a preoccupation with the sexually
perverse particularly in films and theatre, obsession with homosexuality, travestism, etc; 3) a desire
to make noise starting with the new sound of the Beatles (1964), reaching a peak of noisy
intensity in the great rock festivals at Woodstock and Altamont (1969); 4) an anti-cognitive, antiintellectual mood of cultural radicalism, evident in the attack on content and interpretation, in the
emphasis on form and style, in the turn to film and dance; efforts to erase the boundary between art
and life, the break up of the genre, the conversion of painting into a happening; 5) the fusion of art
and politics the infusion into art of a certain temper and mood created by the alienating
confrontation of the individual with the politics of the 60s, a mood described as anti-government,
anti-institution, a mood which turned against art.
The emergence of Postmodern fiction, with the New Journalism or New Nonfiction, and
Self-Reflexive Fiction. New Journalism (Truman Capotes In Cold Blood, subtitled A Nonfiction
Novel, 1966) claims absolute adherence to fact, without discarding the truth of the subjective
vision, freely borrowing congenial techniques from the novel and various devices from the other
media, dissolving the lines between the traditional literary genres. Wolfes The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test (1968) best illustrates the new nonfiction growing out of the 60s.
The self-reflexive fiction, produced by the new writers of the 1960s: William Burroughs, John
Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and others, also attempted to erase the
boundaries between art and life, by constructing a text which uses incongruity, disruptiveness,

arbitrariness, absurdity, irony, parody and self-parody, black humor and fabulation to challenge all
meaning, all forms of authority, including its own possibilities of representing reality. In doing so it
casts total doubt on the relation between the real and the imaginary, between history and the subject,
between official discourse and historical truth. At the end of these intricate stories there is no real
message, no order, no easy resolution, no pseudomoral statement, only a text that offers itself as a
kind of nonsense delirium that, to a great extent, reflects the nonsense of historical events and the
delirium of the language recounting these events (R. Federmann). In the conclusion of The
Postmodern Turn, Ihab Hassan contends that the American sixties, with all their liberationist and
countercultural tendencies, may be regarded as the energizing matrix of postmodernism, if not its
origin. As an artistic, philosophical and social phenomenon, postmodernism in America represents a
culture revolution of which the spirit of the 60s, from the visionarism of the New Frontier
(Kennedys doctrine) and the hopes of the Great Society (Lyndon Johnson) through anger, revolt,
and iconoclasm to the antinomianism, skepticism and alienation of the ending years of the decade,
acted as a catalyst.
In the early 60s, the black novelist James Baldwin had a great influence upon the intellectuals. In his
essay The Fire Next Time (1963), he depicts the effects of racial prejudice on blacks so tellingly.
Baldwins message is that the whites fail to change, there will be fire spreading from Lenox Avenue
to white America in all directions. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King the civil rights
movement reached its highest moral ground. King was a catalyst; he brought people together and
energized not only the moral activists but centrists like Faulkner. Kings campaign of civil
disobedience was supported by many white Southern liberals. After Kings assassination in 1968,
riots signaled the renewed separation of races. Black leadership grew more militant; some
campaigned for the establishment of the Republic of Black Africa in the Southern US. Haley
published Roots. 1965 the Vietnam war started, a further cause for renewed separation of the races
(the draftees were mostly poor whites and poor blacks). The young rebels of the New Left set as their
goal the demolition of America they knew and the substitution of a socialist utopia. The New Left
pronounced itself much more moral than the old radical movements. Its manifesto was Tom
Haydens Analyses and Proposals for American Society (1962). 1963 Betty Friedan, The Feminine
Mystique. The early 60s Kennedys presidency came to be compared with the Camelot of King
Arthur. Under president Lyndon Johnson the Vietnam war; 1968 Norman Mailer published his
account of the protest march on the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night.
American Studies in the 60s: the 60s dealt a heavy blow to the consensus assumptions about
American culture and society on which the great unifying myths and the holistic theory which
explained American civilization and character were based. As a consequence, American Studies was
bereaved of a workable methodology and a unitary theory. The cultural explosion of the 60s played
an essential role in the democratization of the American Studies movement; it produced a great
diversification of the field, approaching culture from the multiple perspectives of race, class, gender
and ethnicity and employing a wide variety of methods from cultural anthropology, the new
ethnography, sociology, reader-response criticism and the study of material culture. The temper and
the mood of the decade determined a radical change in the movement. From homogenous,
monolithic and nationalistic, American Studies became heterogenous, pluralistic and transnational.
The fragmentation of cultural consensus which began in the late 60s may be interpreted not as
cultural crisis but as a transition to a multicultural society in which the continuous subversion of
centers and re-making of boundaries becomes a mechanism of change and ensures the flexibility and
the vitality of the democratic system.
1970s: renaissance of individualism, the Me decade - the positive effects of the Space Program:
the use of satellites for communications and meteorology. Electronics widely applied, impressive
developments in cybernetics and automation. American liberalism failed to implement a successful
program. Nixon won the elections in 1968, climactic point of the counterculture protest. He was

supported chiefly by middle America, the great silent majority. By the early 1970s, the
revitalization of traditional conservative values became desirable, a return to the puritan work ethic
and the pioneering spirit of individual enterprise seemed the remedy for economic recession. The
confidence of the people in the political system reached unprecedented lows. After Nixon resigned
office, Gerald Fords presidency was a time of calm and inertia. In 1976, Jimmy Carter (Democrat)
won the elections. His moderate liberalism and human rights doctrine resurrected the individualist
discourse of American democracy and reflected the move of the decade toward the problems of the
individual human being. However, his inefficient management of the economy eroded once more the
confidence in the capacity of liberalism to provide the best leadership for the nation. The
disappointment with Americas failure to cope successfully with the social and international issues of
the 60s and the economic setbacks of the early 70s determined a renaissance of individualism. The
70s were called the Me decade the decade of selfishness, its cultural mood was called the
culture of narcissism. Social changes act against public commitment, civic idealism and the sense of
civic duty, and the individual turns to self-knowledge and self-definition, to concerns with self and
role, and interhuman relations. A shift to personal and interpersonal relations occurs. Bodily
preoccupations (enthusiasm for jogging, aerobics, interest in natural foods) are combined with
concerns for psychic health, transcendental meditation, psychoanalysis, encounter groups. There is a
search for quality of life as well as of the environment. As predicted by Toffler in Future Shock
(1970), a variety of subcults or sub-societies produce a diversity of life-styles; choosing a lifestyle gives one a sense of identity. Tofflers Future Shock declared that change was engulfing
contemporary society. Many people were coping by joining one of the numerous cults that were
springing up in response to the need for the feeling of certainty and community. 1971 ONeills
Coming Apart analyses the counter-culture, expression of the rebellion of young Americans in the
60s and 70s: new fashions, rock festivals, the political thrust of the hippies.
The baby-boom generation passes from rebeliuosness against the system to using the system for
ones own business, social and personal advantage hippies become yuppies (young urban
professionals, or young upwardly mobile professionals). Evolution of the civil rights: Womens
Lib continue to exert a strong influence, feminine sexuality and homosexuality receive public
acceptance lifestyles after the sexual revolution are expressed in Updikes Rabbit is Rich (1980).
The decade is the apogee of postmodernism: Barths Chimera (1972) and Letters (1979), Pynchons
Gravitys Rainbow (1973), Hawkes, Sukenik, Bellow (Humboldts Gift, 1975 transition from
modernism to postmodernism). The 1970s see the synthesis of the two opposing cultures, the
official and the counterculture. Progressive ideologies, which emphasize egalitarianism and the
claims of the masses, are supplanted by the conservative exaltation of traditional values and of the
rights of the individuals. America in the 1970s offered the image of a pluralistic rather than divided
society, seemingly atomized by the revival of individualism, but still united by the ultimate belief in
the perennial values of American civilization. Economists, sociologists, writers and thinkers became
apologists for pluralism, individualism and free-enterprise an intellectual offensive of the new
conservatism, and of the Great Renaissance of Individualism. Electronic expansion of evangelism:
radio and TV preachers call upon the silent majority to join in the crusade against the moral decay;
evangelism reached the proportions of a third Great Awakening, comparable in social impact to
those in 1740s and 1800s. It acquired not only the significance of a revolution in the religious life but
also that of a manifestation of the new cultural conservatism and of the new relation between
individualism, pluralism and technological development. Late 70s, television became the instrument
of invigorated fundamentalism: Falwells Gospel Hour.
1980s: 1980 Reagan becomes the conservative leader of the nation (reelected in 1984). He urged
the values of small government and limited regulation. In foreign affairs, he saw in the Soviet Union
a totalitarian menace. Reagan won the presidential election, due to a neoconservative program
professing a return to the enduring hard values which had made for Americas greatness, free

enterprise, confidence in individual liberty, a pluralist society drawing its vitality from family and
community, suspicion of big government and excessive regulation. He turns the renaissance of
individualism into a restoration of confidence in the system, with the redefinition of the values of
faith, family, work and neighborhood, the image of a people united in the strive to build an
American opportunity society. Inspired in his double stress on traditional moral values and
individualism, Reagans neoconservatism also benefited from the revival of fundamentalism and the
electronic expansion of evangelism.
1980s were called the Information Age: there was a fundamental change in the nature of business,
industry, work, travel and life style, owing to the unprecedented developments in the computer and
telecommunication technologies. The progress in electronics, cybernetics, communication
encouraged equally the narcissism of the 70s and the pluralism of the 80s. Pluralism is evident in the
wide variety of magazines and journals, in diversified television channels; the mass audience
dispersed into smaller interest groups. By the late 80s, the shift from tolerance of difference to
recognition and generalization of difference was increasingly radicalized, and multiculturalism was
catapulted to national visibility. The assimilationist paradigm collapsed; the new ethnicity of the
1970s and the new pluralism of the 80s represent two stages of the same process of ethnification
of America, which had started in the 60s; Sollors shows that ethnicity becomes increasingly a
question of cultural consent, a voluntary act stressing difference along not only cultural, but also
social, economic and politic lines (Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture,
1986). A rich and varied literature of ethnicity rises: Nicholosa Mohr and Aurora Levins Morales,
(American Hispanics), Leslie Marmon Silko (Native American) , Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy
Tan (Chinese American). Postfeminist writings (results of the feminist victories won in the 60s): a
great number of women writers, including among the minority groups subversive of hegemonic
culture.
1984 was declared by Newsweek Year of the Yuppie: young people who, rather than rebelling
against the system, preferred to exploit it for personal advantage (the new unromantics). In 1980,
Reverend Falwell published Listen America! 1984- Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde: author-activist,
opposed to middle-class values. 1987 The Closing of American Mind, by Alan Bloom. 1989- G.
Bush elected president.
The institutionalization of conservatism in the 1980s, with its focus on free-enterprise and
individualism, was meant to resurrect the old American dream of unity through strong individualism
in a spiritually renewed society. Yet, this very spirit of free-enterprise and individualism rendered
pluralism profoundly unstable. The gap between the few successful and the many unsuccessful
widened, creating an unprecedented concentration of richness in the hands of very few. In 1988,
George Bush became president. During his administration, the collapse of communism and the Gulf
War made US the most powerful nation in the world; domestically, Bush was confronted with the
federal deficit, mounting ethnic strife; the division of the population was sharpened.
In 1992, the democrat Bill Clinton was elected, due to his promise of change that would revitalize
the American dream of a welfare society.
Conclusion: Decentering processes, such as globalization, post-colonialism and post-communism,
which call for permanent re-making of boundaries, subversion of centers, have transformed the
world at the end of 20th century into a place of extraordinary diversity, fluidity and relativity,
involving issues of political and cultural representation of a variety of social groups identified by
such markers as race, class, gender, age, religion and sexual behavior. In the US the pluralist search
for identity, expressed by the metaphors of the melting pot or the salad bowl, is gradually giving way
to the struggle for the representational rights of various group identities. Culture is perceived as a
multitude of cultures.