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Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America
Author(s): Deborah Nelson (Author)
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication Date: 6 Feb. 2002
- Language: English
- Print length: 234 pages
- ISBN-10: 0231111207
- ISBN-13: 9780231111201
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
[Nelson’s] approach is often provocative and her research exhaustive.–Choice
Rethinks confessional poetry in liberating ways… rich insights.–Modernism/ Modernity
Nelson cogently details the emergence of women’s privacy as an act of confession and examines confessional poets such as Plath and Sexton, whose personal self-disclosures anticipate the Supreme Court’s emerging interpretation of prviacy as no longer available in silence.–Shelly Eversley “American Literature “
Refusing to simplify, she produces what might well be one of the most intellectually challenging and provactive views of lyric poetry in the postwar years–Edward Brunner “Contemporary Literature “
About the Author
Deborah Nelson is assistant professor of English and gender studies at the University of Chicago.
