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Paranoia, Politics, and the Popular Imagination
"The postmodern American novel is acutely concerned with conspiracy theory as a form of narrative and political authority.
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About Paranoia, Politics, and the Popular Imagination
"The postmodern American novel is acutely concerned with conspiracy theory as a form of narrative and political authority. In the works of Pynchon, Doctorow, Atwood and DeLillo, conspiracy emerges as the focal point of public memory and social resistance. This study traces conspiracy as a literary metaphor for a transformation in the American national identity, from a public besieged with internal enemies to one which identifies its own government as the internal enemy. Against these dynamics, narrative memory in the postmodern novel becomes a means of reconstructing and authorizing the political, personal and historical self. I identify three periods in this century's construction of conspiracy narratives: we have moved from a government-authorized narrative to a popular response to this narrative, back to the social text of this conspiracy dialectic, in search of a comprehensive construct"--Leaf iv
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