Nuclear fables : a study of narratives from the atomic age

This thesis is an investigation of the relationship between imaginative writing and the nuclear state. As one ethnographer of nuclear societies, Hugh Gusterson, has argued recently, 'if there is any culture that deserves to be denaturalized and exoticized, hence opened up to a fresh and potentially critical perspective, it is surely that of America's generals, admirals, nuclear scientists, and defense contractors'. This thesis proposes a study of the literary representation (the 'nuclear fables') of that culture.Chapter One considers the scope of the relationship between representation and the bomb. It begins with an extended critique of recent attempts to generate a nuclear criticism from within a literary-critical framework. A new critical methodology is then developed, integrating these previous strategies with recent enthographic accounts of life in the nuclear state. This introductory chapter concludes with the illumination and definition of a specific 'nuclearist subjectivity'.The four chapters which follow trace the historical shifts in the representation of this 'nuclearist subject' in two waves of publication in the 1950s and the 1980s. Chapter Two is organized around a reading of Dexter Master's popular novel, The Accident (1955). This novel is treated as a representative nuclear fable from the first wave, and the reading is focused on the intersection of an anxious nuclearist subject with discourses of the body, of gender, and of ethnicity.Chapter Three continues the investigation of early nuclearist subjectivity, tracing the evolution of a confident nuclearist subject able to control atomic anxiety. It begins with readings of Michael Amrine's novel, Secret (1950), and Nothing So Strange (1947), a novel by James Hilton. C.P. Snow's 1954 novel, The New Men, is then used to suggest that the nuclearist subject is best understood as a particular reorganization of a pre-atomic social order.Chapter Four places the nuclear fable in the wider context of atomic war fiction. It is organized around a comparative reading of two representative fantasies of post-nuclear survival: Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959), and Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro (1985). It is argued that these texts display the limits of nuclearist subjectivity, representing the possibilities and limitations of a space predicated on the loss of atomic self-control.