The Book and the Box: Postwar Literature and Cultural Regulation in the Age of Television

"The Book and the Box" traces the intersection between postwar literature and communications policy in the context of American television from the 1950s to the early 1970s. While recent postwar critics have focused on television solely in terms of technology, I remind readers that the connections between literature and other media are not just technological, but social, institutional, and legal as well. I argue that literary figures and broadcast regulators in the 1950s and early 1960s sought to reform television through policies that drew upon modernist critiques of mass culture, and that when this project failed, later writers sought to teach media literacy both in their novels and occasionally through their waning influence over the cultural sphere of television. In the first half of my dissertation, I examine how the works of New York Intellectuals---who saw themselves as the unappointed regulators of culture---were adapted for their contemporary media landscapes. For these figures, television offered the opportunity to disseminate a literary sensibility they thought necessary for liberal governance. However, this project of civic pedagogy was constricted by the political, economic, and aesthetic limitations of television. In the project's second half, I document the decline of reform efforts that sought to regulate culture through television content and the reemergence of a strong avant-garde formalist strain of modernism championed by Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan's declaration that "the medium is the message" taught the patently modernist lesson of form-as-content but disregarded the link between content and civic values that earlier literary intellectuals had stressed. By rationalizing current broadcasting practices as technologically predetermined, McLuhan's theories accommodated and reinforced a growing tendency to deregulate television broadcasting. Although emerging postwar writers drew upon McLuhan's theories to produce a poetics informed by television, many of their works assessed a newly deregulated cultural and broadcasting terrain with apprehension over the new powers afforded to television networks and advertisers. No longer capable of importing literary values to television, these writers instead hoped that their novels could act as primers for a new media environment.