The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State, Timothy Melley

Автор: Melley Timothy
Название: Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America
ISBN: 0801486068 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780801486067
Издательство: Wiley EDC
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Цена: 32020.00 T
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Why, Timothy Melley asks, have paranoia and conspiracy theory become such prominent features of postwar American culture? In Empire of Conspiracy, Melley explores the recent growth of anxieties about thought-control, assassination, political indoctrination, stalking, surveillance, and corporate and government plots. At the heart of these developments, he believes, lies a widespread sense of crisis in the way Americans think about human autonomy and individuality. Nothing reveals this crisis more than the remarkably consistent form of expression that Melley calls "agency panic"—an intense fear that individuals can be shaped or controlled by powerful external forces. Drawing on a broad range of forms that manifest this fear—including fiction, film, television, sociology, political writing, self-help literature, and cultural theory—Melley provides a new understanding of the relation between postwar American literature, popular culture, and cultural theory.Empire of Conspiracy offers insightful new readings of texts ranging from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to the Unabomber Manifesto, from Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders to recent addiction discourse, and from the "stalker" novels of Margaret Atwood and Diane Johnson to the conspiracy fictions of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Kathy Acker. Throughout, Melley finds recurrent anxieties about the power of large organizations to control human beings. These fears, he contends, indicate the continuing appeal of a form of individualism that is no longer wholly accurate or useful, but that still underpins a national fantasy of freedom from social control.

Автор: Melley C. D.
Название: Before I Leave Canada
ISBN: 0993773249 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780993773242
Издательство: Неизвестно
Цена: 7990.00 T
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Автор: Melley Ken
Название: The Anatomy of Baseball Nicknames
ISBN: 1642143790 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781642143799
Издательство: Неизвестно
Цена: 14670.00 T
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Описание: The Anatomy of Baseball Nicknames is filled with a selection of over seven hundred monikers given athletes, mostly in the game of baseball, that will make for an enjoyable read whether you are a fan of "America's Game" or not. Be it "the Left Arm of God" or "the Octopus" or "the Gooney Bird," all of these have been tagged to significant ballplayers in their major league careers. Besides the major leagues, which date back to the late 1800s, there is a wonderful parallel history of Negro Baseball teams, owners, and players and the powerful way in which nicknames were integral to the game. The integration of Major League Baseball, which began in 1947, when Jackie Robinson stepped on the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers, did not end the nickname era. There is also a revealing chapter on girls and women baseball players. The first game between two women's teams, where the players were paid for their play, dates back to the 1870s. Along with all the nicknames cited, there are over two hundred pictures of players categorized by their nicknames. The reader will recognize and identify with many of these nicknames, but one will find that far too many have been lost to the history of the game.

Автор: Melley C. D.
Название: The Prairie Fire Within
ISBN: 0991713788 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780991713783
Издательство: Неизвестно
Цена: 14890.00 T
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Описание: Amanda Bellamy, a clerk in a Toronto law firm, has just inherited her uncle's farm in the rural community of Melville, Saskatchewan. When she moves back to the farming community, she falls back in love with the community of her youth, and also falls for one of her employees. With family drama looming, Amanda needs to battle a jealous relative, and her heart, in order to tame The Prairie Fire Within.

Автор: Melley Timothy
Название: Covert Sphere
ISBN: 0801478537 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780801478536
Издательство: Wiley EDC
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Цена: 30870.00 T
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In December 2010 the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acknowledged that it was providing major funding for thirteen episodes of Eagle Four—a new Afghani television melodrama based loosely on the blockbuster U.S. series 24. According to an embassy spokesperson, Eagle Four was part of a strategy aimed at transforming public suspicion of security forces into something like awed respect. Why would a wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national security as a concept and a transformation of democracy.

In The Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new cultural imaginary, "the covert sphere." One of the surprising consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely substantially on fiction to "know," or imagine, their nation's foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state was instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty that has plagued American society ever since—and, Melley argues, that would eventually find its fullest expression in postmodernism.

The Covert Sphere traces these consequences from the Korean War through the War on Terror, examining how a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular entertainments—from The Manchurian Candidate through 24—as well as influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien, and many others.