scholarly journals Et Tu, Atticus!: The Hero of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Akiyoshi Suzuki
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
American South ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
The Poor ◽  
To Kill A Mockingbird ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Cold War

Against the background of the Cold War, this article rethinks the novel (1960) and film (1962) To Kill a Mockingbird, more specifically Atticus Finch’s characterization as the courageous, unblemished defender of an unjustly accused black man in the American South. Because of Atticus’s unrelenting efforts to exonerate Tom Robinson, he has been proclaimed the 20th century’s greatest American movie hero. At a closer look, however, it turns out that, while Atticus fights hard for Tom, he nevertheless, and as a matter of course, abandons the investigation into the stabbing death of Bob Ewell, a poor white man and Tom’s accuser. The New Yorker magazine noted this conflict in the movie. So, it begs the question: from what social attitudes does this broad-spectrum admiration for Atticus emerge? This article proposes an answer: it originates in identity-centrism, an attitude that underlies United States ideology during the Cold War era and results, specifically, in a total disregard for the poor. In other words, To Kill a Mockingbird is not a closed-ended novel of good versus evil, but an open-ended work that raises a troubling question about diversity.

Between Girls: Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster and Friendship as a Monologic Formulation

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-64
Author(s):  
SHARON MONTEITH
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
American South ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The American South ◽  
Direct Correspondence

In the work of contemporary writers who explore the racial and social geography of growing up in the American South, fleeting encounters between white and black girls abound but enduring friendships prove to be more problematic to represent. In Ellen Foster (1987), Ellen and Starletta's association stretches across the novel whereas, most frequently in fictions, the points at which black and white women converge and relate tend to be brief and transient, as in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) where a heavily pregnant and fugitive Sethe is aided by poor white Amy; or in Thulani Davis's 1959 (1992) where the brief kindness of a white woman is remembered as a significant, if fleeting gesture. I wish to raise questions about the ways in which cross-racial childhood relationships are represented formally and aesthetically. There is often an understandable but troubling literary–critical impasse whereby black girls are contained within the first-person narrations of white protagonists which, whilst explicating the connection between the girls, risk engulfing or subsuming the black “best friend.” I shall examine the ways in which this may be the inevitable result of the Bildungsroman form and consider how the representation of the cross-racial friendship at the heart of Ellen Foster is modified in direct correspondence to the novel's structuring.

scholarly journals Dr. Strangelove or How I Should Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Andre Dias
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Third ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Democratic System ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Do So

This paper presents a Foucauldian discourse analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The analysis examines linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of both the film and the novel. It is composed of three parts: the first is an analysis of the Manichaeism during the Cold War period and how it turned the Soviets into mortal enemies of the United States; the second is how the nuclear threat and the Cold War paranoia could destroy the democratic system in the United States; and the third analysis explain how Fascistic relations could be cultivated through the discipline of bodies. It has been concluded that the movie is presenting a concept, here referred to as Strangelove’s Hypothesis, that a Strangelovian scenario (i.e., a nuclear holocaust, usually caused by incompetence or without the will to do so) could lead to the emergence of a Fascistic-like form of government in order to restore security. The solution presented to avoid such scenario is a sociopsychological change in order to pursue more peaceful relations.

Dependency theory and its relevance today: international institutions in telecommunications and structural power

1994 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Hills
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Capital Investment ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Dependency Theory ◽  
Indigenous Development ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

The majority of political theories have arisen in opposition to existing theories and the interests they represent. Dependency theory was no different in this regard. It arose as a reaction to ‘modernization’ theory, which linked industrialization to political development and to those theories of political development which themselves represented American interests during the period of the Cold War.1 It arose also in reaction to the economic theory of ‘trickle down’ which characterized the post-war social democratic concern with economic growth and Keynesian economics in industrialized countries and which linked the poor in the industrialized West with the poor in the non-industrialized South. In both, Keynesian based, state led policies of capital investment were expected to provide the locomotive for indigenous development.

Confronting the Monolith: Authority and the Cold War in Gravity's Rainbow

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN HAMILL
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gravity’S Rainbow ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

One of the notable aspects of Gravity's Rainbow, if we consider it as an historical novel of a special kind, is the way in which “great” political leaders are barely mentioned. The carnival lacks the mock king, and the historical novel lacks the leader who embodies history. The explanation here is paradoxically historicist. Gravity's Rainbow explicitly addresses a constructed audience (in the Orpheus Theatre) in the Cold War and is about the formation of the Cold War in its techno-bureaucratic context. The realpolitik of authority in the Cold War context has changed. Bureaucratic constructions of System operate as the modus operandi for authority in the novel and they parallel the historical formation of Systems theory and analysis with such US organizations as RAND. This development represents, in the technologies and the discourses of the military and political strategists, a response to Hitler and the supposed tyranny and threat of Communism. The series of characters we encounter within the novel reflects different forms of entrapment and/or lines of flight in response to the authority of the System in what John Johnston has called an assemblage, or postmodern multiplicity. Containment and counterforce become metaphors which Pynchon scurrilously uses to subvert the moral righteousness of the Western Cold Warriors in their defense of a “free world” (paradoxically) under siege from an ever threatening Communism. Pynchon is interested not in the great historical figure, but in the relation of the individual to the System, militarily, scientifically, socially, and sexually.

The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975

1981 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl E. Pletsch
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scientific Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Cold War

Our ideas of tradition, culture, and ideology found their places in the social scientific discourse of the 1950s and 1960s as part of modernization theory. This supposed theory was heir to ancient occidental habits of mythological thinking about history, as is well known.1 But the reorientation of these ideas in the postwar years was guided more specifically by the novel division of the globe into three conceptual “worlds” in response to the Cold War.

Damned Kids

The Damned ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 57-66
Author(s):  
Nick Riddle
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Generative Power ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter assesses the children in Joseph Losey's The Damned (1963). King's gang, if not actually orphans, are given no mothers or fathers to rail against. The children themselves, of course, are orphans, or at least motherless, and there is also an absence of the 'domestic', in the sense that one never sees a 'home' in the conventional sense. Yet parenthood, childhood, and generative power are strong themes in the film. Meanwhile, Bernard's children — well-spoken, precocious, innocent but deadly — have a lineage that is particularly British in origin. They also share with a handful of contemporary films the distinction of introducing something sinister into the cultural iconography of the child. So who, exactly, are 'The Damned'? Clearly, it is the young in general, consigned to an uncertain fate by nuclear proliferation and the Cold War, by the establishment struggling to maintain the vestiges of an empire, and by social attitudes that see them as a problem to be contained.

The Sound of Life in Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde (The Karnau Tapes)

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-381
Author(s):  
Arina Rotaru
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
The Novel ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Mechanical Destruction ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Strong Resemblance ◽  
The Cold War

In Marcel Beyer’s celebrated Flughunde (1995), the discovery of an underground archive of sound in the aftermath of the Cold War—preserved despite strategies apparently calling for its mechanical destruction—reassigns agency and voice to instrumentalized victims of National Socialism. By highlighting the close connection between an alleged security custodian of the archive, the actual National Socialist sound cartographer Hermann Karnau, and Moreau, a character bearing a strong resemblance to the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, Beyer’s novel draws attention to a utopian experiment with life that was carried out in the wake of the colonial enterprise in the Pacific and posits additional historical undertones manifested in Karnau’s National Socialist experiments with sound. Karnau’s attempt to master vocal timbre in particular foregrounds technologies that make it possible to manipulate voice and memory in the post-Fascist and post-Communist present. In spite of technological alteration, archived voices of colonial and National Socialist subjects manifest a vitalist aesthetic. With its concern for race, sound, and memory, the novel breaks new ground in telling the story of the National Socialist and colonial past in the aftermath of the Cold War.

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