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No Accident, Comrade

By Steven Belletto

No Accident, Comrade

By Steven Belletto

0 - Default Title
Description
No Accident, Comrade argues that chance became a complex yet conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of thinkers--politicians, novelists, historians, biologists, sociologists, and others--contended that totalitarianism denied the very existence and operation of chance in the world. They claimed that the USSR perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a fiction amplified by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence the popular American refrain used to refer to Marxism: "It was no accident, Comrade").By reading an expansive range of American novels published between 1947-2005, alongside nonfiction texts by the likes of Jerzy Kosinski, Daniel Bell, Ian Hacking, and mid-century game theorists, No Accident, Comrade explains how associations of chance with democratic freedom and the denial of chance with totalitarianism circulated in Cold War America. Chance became tied to the liberties of U.S. democracy, whereas its eradication or denial became symptomatic of Soviet tyranny. With works by Nabokov, Ellison, Pynchon, Didion, DeLillo, Colson Whitehead, and many others, Steven Belletto shows how writers developed innovative strategies for dealing with and incorporating these ever-present beliefs about chance and its role in their culture. These newly developed narrative techniques allowed them to theorize, satirize, and make sense of the constantly changing relationship between the individual and the state during a largely rhetorical conflict.
Product details
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
216
Release Date:
2011-12-28
Publication Date:
2011-12-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0199826889
ISBN13:
9780199826889
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
533 g
Height:
161 cm
Width:
240 cm
Thickness:
17 cm
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