Land of Tomorrow:  Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2019)

Winner of the 2019 Louis Bredvold Prize for Scholarly Publication.

Many histories of the decades following World War II describe this period as the “apex of American liberalism.” My book shows how the literary writing and civic culture of these decades in fact saw the development of a new type of liberalism–one that turned against the basic assumptions of New Deal reform and the legacy of the long Progressive era. To explore this major shift in American political culture, I examine the work of Vladimir Nabokov, Patricia Highsmith, Ralph Ellison, Walker Percy, and more than two dozen other writers and intellectuals. I read their work alongside major transformations in twentieth-century society. These transformations include the formation of new “aestheticized” models of civic society; the professionalization of psychology and the popularization of psychoanalysis; the reception of French existentialism; shifts in corporate management theory away from Fordism and Taylorism; and the rise of an “independence regime” in US political culture.

Land of Tomorrow puts literary studies in conversation with intellectual history and political theory. For instance, in the book’s third chapter, I show how many liberal thinkers borrowed from the psychological professions–and the theories of psychoanalysis–to understand poverty, crime, and mass conformity. This use of psychological templates influenced public intellectuals, novelists, and even the techniques of early television. As a result, collective behaviors were often recast as phenomena of a private psychological realm, and many liberals neglected the structural conditions of inequality by attending instead to the private lives of supposedly deviant and neurotic peoples. These liberals also recast possible social interventions after the image of therapy. I track this new way of thinking across work by several writers, including Patricia Highsmith and Richard Yates, as well as the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Each chapter of Land of Tomorrow moves between the granular features of individual cultural works and wider changes in the structures of thought and feeling in postwar America. By moving between the granular and the structural, Land of Tomorrow shows how a diverse body of postwar thought gave cultural prestige to political sensibilities that betrayed the reformist impulses of an earlier era of American liberalism.

For more about Land of Tomorrow, visit the book’s listing at Oxford University Press or Amazon. Here’s a PDF of the book’s Table of Contents.

The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Obsolescence

This recently completed manuscript began with an unexpected discovery: the computer’s first appearance on Broadway was in a romantic comedy, William Marchant’s The Desk Set (1955). I was surprised that comedy offered a cultural form for the computer, especially at such a relatively early point in the history of the technology. This anecdote in literary history led me to study the many other ways that forms of comedy have shaped the social history of computing. I found that comedy and computation have had a longstanding, if somewhat fractious, relationship. The two have been coming together since the earliest days of computing. What does it mean for comedy to provide a cultural form for the computer’s legibility in public space?

The social assimilation of computers–some scholars describe this process as becoming computational–has generated distinct forms of incongruity, conflict, and socioeconomic uncertainty. My book shows how comedy has provided resources for understanding and managing these incongruities. In other words, comedy has served as a phenomenological model for grappling with the integration of computing, even as that technology has produced sweeping changes throughout the social world.