Relocating the American Dream : The America of the 1960s as Portrayed by the New Journalists Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe

The concept of the American Dream was subject to a strong re-evaluation process in the 1960s, as counterculture became a prominent force in American society. A massive generation of young people, moved by the Vietnam War, the hippie movement, and psychedelic experimentation, created substantial social turbulence in their efforts to break out of conventional patterns and to create a new kind of society. This thesis outlines and analyses the concept of the American Dream in popular imagination through three works of new journalism. My primary data consists of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1967), Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), and Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968). In defining the American Dream, I discuss the history of the concept as well as its manifestations in popular culture. Because of its elusive and amorphous nature, the concept of the American Dream can only be examined in cultural texts that portray the values, sentiments, and customs of a certain era. I have divided the analytical section of my thesis into three parts. In the first part I examine how the authors discuss the American society of their time in relation to ideology, capitalism, and the media. In the second part I focus on the Vietnam War and the controversy it creates in relation to the notions of freedom and patriotism. In the third part I discuss how the authors portray the countercultural visions of a better America that challenged the traditional interpretations of the American Dream. I also discuss the dark side of the new dream: the problems and disillusions that came with the effort to change the world. This thesis is an effort to trace the relocation of the American Dream in the context of the 1960s counterculture and new journalism. It hopes to provide a valuable addition to the cultural history of the sixties and to the effort of conceptualizing the American Dream.

Other Side of This Life : Death, Value, and Social Being in Thomas Pynchon's Fiction

This dissertation analyzes the interrelationship between death, the conditions of (wo)man s social being, and the notion of value as it emerges in the fiction of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon (1937 ). Pynchon s present work includes six novels V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity s Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006) and several short stories. Death constitues a central thematic in Pynchon s work, and it emerges through recurrent questions of mortality, suicide, mass destruction, sacrifice, afterlife, entropy, the relationship between the animate and the inanimate, and the limits of representation. In Pynchon, death is never a mere biological given (or event); it is always determined within a certain historical, cultural, and ideological context. Throughout his work, Pynchon questions the strict ontological separation of life and death by showing the relationship between this separation and social power. Conceptual divisions also reflect the relationship between society and its others, and death becomes that through which lines of social demarcation are articulated. Determined as a conceptual and social "other side", death in Pynchon forms a challenge to modern culture, and makes an unexpected return: the dead return to haunt the living, the inanimate and the animate fuse, and technoscientific attempts at overcoming and controlling death result in its re-emergence in mass destruction and ecological damage. The questioning of the ontological line also affects the structuration of Pynchon's prose, where the recurrent narrated and narrative desire to reach the limits of representation is openly associated with death. Textualized, death appears in Pynchon's writing as a sudden rupture within the textual functioning, when the "other side", that is, the bare materiality of the signifier is foregrounded. In this study, Pynchon s cultural criticism and his poetics come together, and I analyze the subversive role of death in his fiction through Jean Baudrillard s genealogy of the modern notion of death from L échange symbolique et la mort (1976). Baudrillard sees an intrinsic bond between the social repression of death in modernity and the emergence of modern political economy, and in his analysis economy and language appear as parallel systems for generating value (exchange value/ sign-value). For Baudrillard, the modern notion of death as negativity in relation to the positivity of life, and the fact that death cannot be given a proper meaning, betray an antagonistic relation between death and the notion of value. As a mode of negativity (that is, non-value), death becomes a moment of rupture in relation to value-based thinking in short, rationalism. Through this rupture emerges a form of thinking Baudrillard labels the symbolic, characterized by ambivalence and the subversion of conceptual opposites.