... as a Boeing technical writer, and Century 21 goes unmentioned in work on the novel’s allusions by Steven Weisenburger and others. Pynchon responds throughout Gravity’s Rainbow to Century 21, particularly its Cold War views of space-age futurism and nuclear weapons. I draw new connections between the...

... insight to the massive paradigm shift that occurs when war moves its theater from the ground to the air, Saint-Amour delinks nuclear criticism from the nuclear age. Doing so allows Saint-Amour to eloquently argue ( pace Benjamin) for brushing futurity against the grain, setting in motion a vibrant...

... dismissed as mere surface. Yet Merrill, the article contends, indulges in what he calls the Ouija’s “backstage gossip” both to establish a queer relationship to poetic tradition and to confront the pervasive menace of the Cold War discourse of the Lavender Scare, which haunts the trilogy’s 1950s origins...

... threat of total nuclear war” (4). I will resist the temptation to describe Grausam’s claims as explosive, but they are ambitious; this is commendable, but it also means that parts of the argument are inevitably more persuasive than others. As Grausam is well aware, considerations of the...

... than an ongoing struggle. And while it is fair to doubt that many people long for the time of imminent nuclear threats, something interesting has happened with the Cold War: it has become an academic topic that it is possible to discuss without primary reference to the ideological or political...

... could only be more of the same. Nothing more could be revealed. All subsequent, post- apocalyptic destruction would be absolutely without meaning, mere repeti­ tion. We can point to four principle areas of postwar apocalyptic representa­ tion. The first is nuclear war, the second is the...

... fiction. Science-fiction representations of the atomic bomb developed out of the future-war-story genre that became popular in the late nineteenth cen­ tury. The popularity of future-war stories can be traced to May 1871, when an English military officer published a short story entitled “The...

... their reconsideration. Most prominent is the postwar as a historical period (effectively 1945–89), defined by the political aesthetics of the Cold War, or even a protracted “interwar” (167), as proposed by contributor Paul K. Saint-Amour, with the nuclear detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the...

...Brooke Horvath For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front , by Kingsbury Celia Malone , University of Nebraska Press , 2010 . 309 pages. Copyright © Hofstra University 2011 Brooke Horvath Learning to Hate the Hun For Home and Country: World War I...

... more sweeping critique than it is typically given credit for; many critics “provincialize” its context— nuclear proliferation—rather than see its immediate concerns as part of a larger ideological project. To be fair, those same critics can hardly be blamed for declining to read the novel...

... apocalyptic visions that have proliferated wildly in the last I200 years, the world has been destroyed by nuclear wars, alien invasions, climatic changes, social upheavals, meteor strikes, and technological shut­ downs. These baroque scenarios are shaped by the eroticism of disaster. The apocalyptic...

... issues as the Korean War, nuclear disarmament, communism, and the Marshall Plan before he emigrated to Nkrumah’s Ghana in 1961 as a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Few scholars have analyzed this period in depth, partly because there is such intense investment in his status as a humanist...

... initially acknowledges the large-scale catastrophe in the near distance, it sinks comfortably into the well-mapped terrain of the post- war suburban novel as it recounts the travails of its amiable but detached protagonist. By novel’s end, Jerry himself suffers devastating personal loss while flying...

... dread of a potential tide of “local catastrophic occurrences.” Writing as the Cold War began a phase of détente and the First and Second Worlds entered long periods of economic retrenchment, Lessing in this passage looks beyond the pressing nuclear issue in order to attend to a wider field of...

... section has some fascinating tidbits, like Jameson’s mediating a spat between Graham Greene and Arthur Koestler, her brief work with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, her deepening friendship with Miłosz, and the pathos of all her friends and family (including her son) dying around her as she becomes...

... Andreas Killen abundantly documents: the Yom Kippur War and the start of the Arab oil embargo, the Paris Peace Accords and the repatriation of the American prisoners of war, the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency as details of the Watergate break-in emerged, the Supreme Court’s Roe...

... “pressing the wrong button” (33), he underscores the sense o f civic disempower- m ent and insecurity associated w ith the early Cold War period, in which nuclear apocalypse could just as plausibly come about from a mistake made by one’s own government as an enemy attack.6 These...

... took to the stage to address the vast crowd and drew a historical parallel to exhort her listeners toward solidarity and political resistance: “We cannot fall into despair. As the poet W. H. Auden once wrote on the eve of World War II: ‘We must love one another or die.’” The marchers cheered, and the...

... Harbor on D ecem ber 7, 1991, the fif­ tieth anniversary o f the Japanese attack, President George Bush put the end o f the Cold War into what he saw as its proper context: “N ow we stand triumphant,” he said, “for a third time this century, this time in the wake o f the Cold War. As in...

... and the Pillar, Giovanni’s Room, and the Straight-Acting Gay Man Certainly Jim lives an adult life that contests Cold War notions of conformity, marriage, and the nuclear family, and in this sense, he is outside the US mainstream. But I question Corber’s assertion that “Jim does not...