Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature

by Kristin L. Matthews

Overview

During the Cold War, the editor of Time magazine declared, "A good citizen is a good reader." As postwar euphoria faded, a wide variety of Americans turned to reading to understand their place in the changing world. Yet, what did it mean to be a good reader? And how did reading make you a good citizen?

In Reading America, Kristin L. Matthews puts into conversation a range of political, educational, popular, and touchstone literary texts to demonstrate how Americans from across the political spectrum—including "great works" proponents, New Critics, civil rights leaders, postmodern theorists, neoconservatives, and multiculturalists—celebrated particular texts and advocated particular interpretive methods as they worked to make their vision of "America" a reality. She situates the fiction of J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Maxine Hong Kingston within these debates, illustrating how Cold War literature was not just an object of but also a vested participant in postwar efforts to define good reading and citizenship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625342355
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	11/04/2016
Series:	Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kristin L. Matthews is associate professor of English and coordinator of the American Studies Program at Brigham Young University.

Table of Contents

Contents
Preface ix
Introduction: "There Is Much to Be Gained by Our Reading" 1
1. America Reads: Literacy and Cold War Nationalism 10
2. Reading for Character, Community, and Country: J. D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye 32
3. Reading to Outmaneuver: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and African
American Literacy in Cold War America 53
4. Reading against the Machine: Oedipa Maas and the Quest for
Democracy in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 80
5. Metafiction and Radical Democracy: Getting at the Heart of John
Barth's Lost in the Funhouse 106
6. Confronting Difference, Confronting Difficulty: Culture Wars,
Canon Wars, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior 131
Conclusion: "Reading Makes a Country Great" 154
Notes 161
Index 197

What People are Saying About This

Sean McCann

Reading America offers an illuminating account of a still incompletely known and important political history, and it provides valuable critical insight into several monuments of literary expression.

Greg Barnhisel

Matthews has a truly astonishing command of the discourse surrounding reading in Cold War America. She makes a smart and ambitious argument.

Editorial Reviews

"Reading America offers an illuminating account of a still incompletely known and important political history, and it provides valuable critical insight into several monuments of literary expression."—Sean McCann, author of A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government

"Matthews has a truly astonishing command of the discourse surrounding reading in Cold War America. She makes a smart and ambitious argument."—Greg Barnhisel, author of Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy

"Matthews breathes life into Holden Caulfield by revealing his culturally conservative modes of interpreting ("reading") his world. In addition, Matthews produces an innovative, well-structured analysis of the various ways in which efforts to expand and shape US consumption of literature during the Cold War found direct and indirect expression in novels by Salinger and by Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Maxine Hong Kingston. . . . With its meticulous research and substantive framework, this volume provides insightful new readings of relatively canonical texts. Highly recommended."—Choice

"As Kristin J. Matthews shows in her valuable study, Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature, by the start of the Cold War books had been treated as loaded weapons for some time . . . Reading America powerfully demonstrates [that] classic works of literature are not so easily contained by nationalist discourses."—College Literature

From the Publisher

As Kristin J. Matthews shows in her valuable study, Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature, by the start of the Cold War books had been treated as loaded weapons for some time... Reading America powerfully demonstrates [that] classic works of literature are not so easily contained by nationalist discourses.

College Literature

Matthews breathes life into Holden Caulfield by revealing his culturally conservative modes of interpreting ("reading") his world. In addition, Matthews produces an innovative, well-structured analysis of the various ways in which efforts to expand and shape US consumption of literature during the Cold War found direct and indirect expression in novels by Salinger and by Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Maxine Hong Kingston.... With its meticulous research and substantive framework, this volume provides insightful new readings of relatively canonical texts. Highly recommended.

Choice