Pursuing privacy in Cold War America / / Deborah Nelson

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910455007503321
• Autore: Nelson Deborah <1962->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: New York : , : Columbia University Press, , 2002; ©1893
• ISBN: 0-231-52869-8; 0-231-50588-4
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (235 p.)
• Collana: Gender and Culture Series
• Disciplina: 811.54080355
• Soggetti: American poetry - 20th century - History and criticism; Privacy in literature; Literature and society - United States - History - 20th century; Privacy, Right of - United States - History - 20th century; Privacy - United States - History - 20th century; Autobiography in literature; Confession in literature; Cold War in literature; Self in literature; Electronic books.
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-200) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction:The Death of Privacy -- Acknowledgments -- One. Reinventing Privacy -- Two. "Thirsting for the Hierarchic Privacy of Queen Victoria's Century" -- Three. Penetrating Privacy -- Four. Confessions Between a Woman and Her Doctor -- Five. Confessing the Ordinary -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.