Reinventing totalitarianism in the postwar American novel

This dissertation studies the artistic ruminations that occur in American literature when 1984 comes and goes without confirming 1984's predictions. Attuned to major mid-century re-formulations of totalitarianism's meaning in Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, and others, this project looks to major novelists for some of our deepest reconsiderations of totalitarianism's place in American culture--as a prophesied future state, as a polemical description of current capitalist reality, as a dark dramatization of imperial ambitions, and as a means to both galvanize countercultural movements and reflect, in the most self-conscious ways, on the recurrent need to imagine the worst of American futures in the first place. Focused on Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and John Edgar Wideman, my project traces writers' tendency to predict the U.S.'s descent into totalitarianism and to pull back from or modify such declarations in later work. I argue throughout for skepticism toward the full brunt of these novels' dystopian claims. Rather, I find in these books not only voices of condemnation but, surprisingly, in their repeated efforts to revivify a fascist threat, an attraction to the imaginative methods of analysis that the capacious categories of totalitarianism and the mesmerized subject open up. The project revises and complicates typical views of the Cold War novel's anti-totalitarianism by arguing that the U.S. writer's career-long preoccupation with the totalitarian as a political diagnosis ultimately seeps into and enhances his artistic choices.