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Bezig met laden... Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (editie 1997)door Margot A. Henriksen (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkDr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age door Margot A. Henriksen
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Did Dr. Strangelove's America really learn to "stop worrying and love the bomb," as the title of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film would have us believe? What has that darkly satirical comedy in common with the impassioned rhetoric of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech or with the beat of Elvis Presley's throbbing "I'm All Shook Up"? They all, in Margot Henriksen's vivid depiction of the decades after World War II, are expressions of a cultural revolution directly related to the atomic bomb.
Because there was little organized, extensive protest against nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation until the 1980s, America's overall reaction to the bomb has been seen as acceptance or indifference. Henriksen argues instead that, in spite of the ease with which Cold War exigencies overrode all protests by scientists or others after the end of World War II, America's psyche was split as surely as the atom was split. In opposition to the "culture of consensus," which never questioned the pursuit of nuclear superiority, a "culture of dissent" was born. Its current of rebellion can be followed through all the forms of popular culture, and Henriksen evokes dozens of illuminating examples from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)973.9History and Geography North America United States 1901-LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Describing the American narrative, Henriksen writes, “Throughout their history Americans have shown an uncanny ability to overlook, overcome, or absorb those disturbing elements in their midst which more dispassionate observers might have used to pierce the armor of American innocence and optimism” (pg. 3). Henriksen writes of the early years following the first atomic bomb detonations, “Filtering through the products of popular culture in these years was a vague sense that the search for security entailed corruption of American ideals and traditions” (pg. 20). This reflected the public’s fear of the American military and government’s newfound power to shape, or destroy, the world. According the Henriksen, “Cold war America witnessed the growth of a new film genre – science fiction – that centered much attention on atomic age concerns about the political morality and apocalyptic potential of atomic and hydrogen bombs” (pg. 50).
Henriksen engages with the role of gender in the historiography, addressing the work of Elaine Tyler May, “whose Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988) demonstrated the connection between the personal and the political during this time period, particularly between family ideology and cold war ideology” (pg. 113-114). Further, “Given the political difficulties associated with expressing fear and discontent in cold war America, Americans often turned to experts – particularly in the field of psychiatry – for help with the discontent and anxiety that they believed they should not be feeling” (pg. 114). This filtered through to popular culture.
Henriksen writes, “The knowledge of what man had deeded to himself in the atomic age was coming into focus: death. The culture of dissent also began to reflect on the malaise connected with the death wish in America” (pg. 197). Moving toward her conclusion, Henriksen writes, “While the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s assassination made palpable America’s proximity to Armageddon and America’s climate of hate, it is somewhat ironic that the cultural catharsis of the atomic age took place during and after these events” (pg. 305). The gallows humor of Dr. Strangelove and novels like Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle offered the means for Americans to process and discuss the reality of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Henriksen concludes, “The history and culture of recent America is then to a significant degree the history and culture of Dr. Strangelove’s America. The central and historical dynamic tension between cultural dissent and the atomic age political status quo, aroused and openly expressed in the cultural revolution of the sixties and early seventies, has persisted in keeping a tenuous balance between American dreams and myths of life and American nightmares and visions of apocalypse” (pg. 388). ( )