Description
Book SynopsisExamining how since 1947 a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture.
Trade Review"His study impressively documents how state secrecy became a privileged topos for reflecting on power and knowledge in late twentieth century American literature and cutlure." —Alexander Dunst,Journal of American Studies
In his exploration of the national security state and the fiction it inspires, Melley engages in a spirited and cerebral examination of certain cultural and political tropes of the Cold Warand beyond, illustrating how often they have been rearticulated in a twenty-first-centurycontext as the War on Terror gathered pace in the wake of 9/11.
-- Sam Goodman * Literature & History *
Table of ContentsPrefaceIntroduction: The Postmodern Public Sphere
Cold War Redux
We Now Know
Public Secrets
Mere Entertainment
Strategic Irrationalism
Representations of the Covert State1. Brainwashed!
The Faisalabad Candidate
Brain Warfare
Little Shop of Horrors
Softening Up Our Boys
Renditions2. Spectacles of Secrecy
Trial by Simulation
Political Theater
Recovered (National) Memory
The State's Two Faces
Fakery in Allegiance to the Truth
The Fabulist Spy3. False Documents
True Lies
Enemies of the State
Psy Ops
The Epistemology of Vietnam4. The Work of Art in the Age of Plausible Deniability
Narrative Dysfunction
Calculated Ellipsis
The Feminization of the Public Sphere
The Journalist as Patsy
Metafiction in Wartime5. Postmodern Amnesia
Assassins of Memory
The Dialectics of Spectacle and Secrecy
Secret History
The Magic Show6. The Geopolitical Melodrama
Ground Zero
Enemies, Foreign and Domestic
Whatever It Takes
Demonology
Melodrama as PolicyNotes
Works Cited
Index
