An army of lovers: eros as attachment in writing of the American sexual revolution

This dissertation argues that Eros as an intimate force of attachment plays a crucial role in the development of alternative social and political forms during the American sexual revolution. Sixties counter-cultural novelists and radical theorists employ a politicized discourse of Eros to imagine new forms of belonging apart from the oppressive social and political constraints of postwar America. Novelists such as Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Pynchon, James Baldwin and Toni Cade Bambara craft “erotic communities” in their texts, while political theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Hannah Arendt and Audre Lorde articulate them in their theories. Erotic communities emerge as social entities out of the relational contradictions of postwar America and are defined by the social constraints of intimate attachment. While most critics have viewed sexuality in postwar America through the lens of the complete liberation of pleasure from repression, I argue that many American writers are interested in developing alternative social constraints to Eros, not eliminating social constraints completely. They articulate these constraints through the discourse of sexual intimacy as attachment, imagining and developing social models based on interdependence, reciprocity and democratic engagement, elements they see lacking in postwar social structures. This dissertation concludes that alternative relational and social forms in postwar America emerge through intimate connection, and it aims to provide a critical iii method to better understand and interpret them in postwar American literature and culture.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Philip M. Long