Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America
Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America explores the relationship between confessional poetry and constitutional privacy doctrine, both of which emerged at the end of the 1950s. While the public declarations of the Supreme Court and the private declamations of the lyric poet may seem unrelated, both express the upheavals in American notions of privacy that marked the Cold War era. Nelson situates the poetry and legal decisions as part of a far wider anxiety about privacy that erupted across the social, cultural, and political spectrum during this period. She explores the panic over the "death of privacy" aroused by broad changes in postwar culture: the growth of suburbia, the advent of television, the popularity of psychoanalysis, the arrival of computer databases, and the spectacles of confession associated with McCarthyism.

Examining this interchange between poetry and law at its most intense moments of reflection in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Deborah Nelson produces a rhetorical analysis of a privacy concept integral to postwar America's self-definition and to bedrock contradictions in Cold War ideology. Nelson argues that the desire to stabilize privacy in a constitutional right and the movement toward confession in postwar American poetry were not simply manifestations of the anxiety about privacy. Supreme Court justices and confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Sylvia Plath were redefining the nature of privacy itself. Close reading of the poetry alongside the Supreme Court's shifting definitions of privacy in landmark decisions reveals a broader and deeper cultural metaphor at work.
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Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America
Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America explores the relationship between confessional poetry and constitutional privacy doctrine, both of which emerged at the end of the 1950s. While the public declarations of the Supreme Court and the private declamations of the lyric poet may seem unrelated, both express the upheavals in American notions of privacy that marked the Cold War era. Nelson situates the poetry and legal decisions as part of a far wider anxiety about privacy that erupted across the social, cultural, and political spectrum during this period. She explores the panic over the "death of privacy" aroused by broad changes in postwar culture: the growth of suburbia, the advent of television, the popularity of psychoanalysis, the arrival of computer databases, and the spectacles of confession associated with McCarthyism.

Examining this interchange between poetry and law at its most intense moments of reflection in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Deborah Nelson produces a rhetorical analysis of a privacy concept integral to postwar America's self-definition and to bedrock contradictions in Cold War ideology. Nelson argues that the desire to stabilize privacy in a constitutional right and the movement toward confession in postwar American poetry were not simply manifestations of the anxiety about privacy. Supreme Court justices and confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Sylvia Plath were redefining the nature of privacy itself. Close reading of the poetry alongside the Supreme Court's shifting definitions of privacy in landmark decisions reveals a broader and deeper cultural metaphor at work.
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Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America

Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America

by Deborah Nelson
Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America

Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America

by Deborah Nelson

Paperback(New Edition)

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Overview

Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America explores the relationship between confessional poetry and constitutional privacy doctrine, both of which emerged at the end of the 1950s. While the public declarations of the Supreme Court and the private declamations of the lyric poet may seem unrelated, both express the upheavals in American notions of privacy that marked the Cold War era. Nelson situates the poetry and legal decisions as part of a far wider anxiety about privacy that erupted across the social, cultural, and political spectrum during this period. She explores the panic over the "death of privacy" aroused by broad changes in postwar culture: the growth of suburbia, the advent of television, the popularity of psychoanalysis, the arrival of computer databases, and the spectacles of confession associated with McCarthyism.

Examining this interchange between poetry and law at its most intense moments of reflection in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Deborah Nelson produces a rhetorical analysis of a privacy concept integral to postwar America's self-definition and to bedrock contradictions in Cold War ideology. Nelson argues that the desire to stabilize privacy in a constitutional right and the movement toward confession in postwar American poetry were not simply manifestations of the anxiety about privacy. Supreme Court justices and confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Sylvia Plath were redefining the nature of privacy itself. Close reading of the poetry alongside the Supreme Court's shifting definitions of privacy in landmark decisions reveals a broader and deeper cultural metaphor at work.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780231111218
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication date: 12/26/2001
Series: Gender and Culture Series
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 232
Product dimensions: 0.53(w) x 6.00(h) x 9.00(d)
Lexile: 1530L (what's this?)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Deborah Nelson is assistant professor of English and gender studies at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Death of Privacy
Part II: Sovereign Domains
Part I: The Sudden Visibility of Privacy
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2 "Thirsting for the Hierarchic Privacy of Queen Victoria's Century'': Robert Lowell and the Transformations of Privacy
Chapter 3 Penetrating Privacy: Confessional Poetry, Griswold v. Connecticut , and Containment Ideology
Chapter 4 Confessions Between a Woman and Her Doctor: Roe v. Wade and the Gender of Privacy
Chapter 5 Confessing the Ordinary: Bowers v. Hardwick and Paul Monette's Love Alone — An Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Cynthia Hogue

Nelson's rereading of confessional poetry in dialogue with landmark Supreme Court privacy decisions is illuminating. She will convince readers that confessional poetry is not an out-of-touch art of the personal voice 'overheard,'but a poetry politically engaged in the debate about Cold War America's self-definition.

Cynthia Hogue, director of the Stadler Poetry Center, Bucknell University

Diane Middlebrook

Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America is an elegant and ambitious book. Nelson zeroes in on a term -- privacy -- that produces a great deal of anxiety in Americans. Her examples are fascinating, her scholarship impressive, and her argument compelling.

Diane Middlebrook, Stanford University and author of Anne Sexton: A Biography

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