| This project explores representations of the family in confessional literature produced after 1945. More specifically, I analyze the role confessional representations of father-daughter, or intergenerational, incest played in the postwar imagination and in forging American empire during the Cold War. As a discursive practice by which institutions are able to maintain surveillance and therefore regulation of the body politic, the confessional mode, defined here as any first-person narrative in which research of the past is precipitated by a moment of crisis in the present, is a particularly apt mode of expression to examine for the operations of power during the Cold War. If the confessional provides a way of reading the institutionalized operations of power vis-a-vis sexuality, feminist theories of imperialism and incest provide a way of reading the operations of power vis-a-vis gender. Therefore, the first four chapters of this dissertation specifically focus on those confessional texts (the novels of Styron and Nabokov and the drama of Arthur Miller) that mobilize intergenerational incest as an innocent and desirable organizing principle for family and nation, while the last two chapters concentrate on those confessional texts (the poetry of Plath and Sexton) that participate in forging a conflicting discourse, one that deconstructs the contradictions and pretense of innocence characteristic of the rhetoric, literature and drama of what the historian William Appleman Williams calls the "imperial anticolonialism" of American foreign and domestic policy during the Cold War. |
