1. CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS TO ACADEMIC CONFERENCE PANELS

A. CALL FOR PAPERS 2002: SHAKESPEARE AT KALAMAZOO
 

Thirty-seventh International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2-5, 2002PROPOSED sessions for this conference are subject to approval by The Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University. SHAKESPEARE AT KALAMAZOO has organized programs at the International Congress since 1989.

Session 1: Shakespeare and the Tradition of the Performing Arts: Gender in Performance. This round table panel invites scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss early modern theatrical practices or matters of performance related to the staging of gender in Shakespeare's plays. Possible topics include theatrical practices and production related to gender issues (e.g., cross dressing, make-up of audience). Papers that address continuities between medieval and early modern performance practice and dramaturgical conventions are also welcome. To enable greater participation in this session, presentations should be no longer than ten minutes.

Session 2: Shakespeare and Cultural Continuity: Language, Politics and Poverty. This sessions invites papers in a variety of areas (art history, philosophy, theology, history and literature) that situate Shakespeare's plays within early modern discourses on poverty and its relation to politics. Possible topics might include medieval and early modern theatrical and political constructions of wealth and poverty; class, gender and kinship structures, service and reward and how language conveys or challenges images of power. Papers that discuss continuities between medieval and early modern notions of politics and poverty are welcome. To enable greater participation in this session, papers should be limited to twenty minutes reading time.

The Congress on Medieval Studies provides a unique milieu for an exchange of insights on Shakespeare's place in the continuum of culture. The following rules corresponding to those established by the Board of the Medieval Institute should be strictly adhered to if you intend to submit an abstract.

1. All abstracts must include the following information at the top of the front page: title of paper, author's name; complete mailing address, including e-mail and fax if available; institutional affiliation, if any, of the author; confirmation of the ten- or twenty-minute reading length; statement of need for audio-visual equipment.

2. Abstracts of papers must be typed, double-spaced, not more than 300 words long, and clearly indicate the paper's thesis, methodology, and conclusions. Accepted abstracts will be submitted for publication to the Shakespeare Newsletter and other periodicals. Publication of abstracts does not preclude publication of papers.

3. THREE HARD COPIES OF ABSTRACTS or, PREFERABLY, COMPLETED PAPERS MUST BE SUBMITTED BY SEPTEMBER 1, 2001. Abstracts or papers submitted after the deadline cannot be considered. Three members of the governing board of SHAKESPEARE AT KALAMAZOO will select the papers. E-mail submission is encouraged to facilitate transmission among the selection panel.

4. Submission of an abstract or paper will be considered agreement by the author to attend the Congress if the paper is accepted.

5. It is understood that papers submitted are essentially new and not presented in public before.

6. Graduate students who wish to submit an abstract should consult their advisors about the suitability of their work and the regulations (if any) of their university.

7. Papers submitted may not require more than TEN MINUTES reading time for Session 1 or TWENTY MINUTES of reading time for Session 2, including slides, films, or other audio-visual support. Session leaders will hold papers strictly to this limit to facilitate discussion.


B. CALL FOR PAPERS for a panel on Communication in Early America: Beyond Anglophone Print Culture
 

Society of Early Americanists Conference
Providence, Rhode Island
10-12 April 2003

Anglophone print culture has been a fruitful line of inquiry into cultures of communication in early America. This panel seeks to broaden discussions of communication by providing an occasion for papers on communication between languages including the roles and representations of interpreters, translators, diplomats or negotiators; on communication amongst non-Anglophones, i.e., between Europeans of the Americas as well as between Native Americans and Euro-Americans; and on other, possibly less systematized kinds of communication including gestural, oral, and pictorial communication, or the language of material culture.

Send 250-word abstract and a short c.v., by September 15, 2002 to mmcmurra@uchicago.edu (email only pls)

Mary Helen McMurran
Harper-Schmidt Fellow
Humanities Collegiate Division
University of Chicago


C. CALL FOR PAPERS for a conference specializing on the Harry Potter novels
 

Nimbus - 2003
Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Hotel
Orlando, Florida
July 17-20, 2003

Nimbus is expected to be a recurring periodic symposium for the purpose of allowing adult fans of the Harry Potter books and universe to: gather; discuss the books and the fandom with other fans, scholars of literature and cultural studies, and professionals in related fields; and gain a new understanding of the Harry Potter phenomenon.

PROGRAM DETAILS:

Proposals are sought in both the academic and fandom culture tracks (described below) for presentations, papers, moderated panels, and workshops on any topic relating to the Harry Potter novels and/or their fan community.

ACADEMIC TRACK:

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

= Gender roles in the series

= The role of authority in the series: rule-breaking and its consequences

= Themes in the series (particularly Harry as Allegory: Good versus Evil)

= Race, class, and other social issues in the series

= Religion in the series (as well as reactions of various religious communities to HP)

= Rowling's usage of myths, folk tales and legends

= Harry Potter: Classics for our Time?

= Comparative analysis of the series with other fantasy or childrens' literature authors (Tolkien, Lewis, Cooper, etc.)

= Harry Potter as Transcultural Phenomenon

= Translations

= Character analyses

Legal (application will be made for MCLE credit hours) ( ½ day)

= Justice in the Wizarding World

= Fanfic and Intellectual Property

= Book-banning and the First Amendment: moderated panel discussion

Educators and Librarians (application will be made for CE credit)

= Hogwarts Professors' Lounge (lesson plans and workshop proposals sought across the curriculum)

= Ask Madam Pince: A Workshop for Librarians and Media Specialists

FANDOM CULTURE TRACK:

Fanfiction

= Fantastic Characters and Where to Find Them (Canon & Originals)

= It's All a Matter of Interpretation: Balancing Canon and Fanon

= Writing in the Dark: Fanficcing an Incomplete Canon

= Women Writers, Male Characters: Gender and Fan Writing

= Crossovers

Fan Art

= The Mirror of Erised: Drawing Recognizable Canon Characters

= External Influences (anime, Disney, other)

Website Administration

= The Masters of All: Webmasters Share Their Secrets

= The Common Rooms: Message Boards and the Fandom

= Essential E-Mail Lists for the HP Fan; Yahoo! and its Role in Developing Online Fandom

General Fandom

= The Perilous Seas: Shipping the Series (het,slash, and smarm)

= Where Generations Meet: Children, Teens, and Adults in Harry Potter Fandom

= All Things Being Equal: What makes Harry Potter different from or similar to other fan phenomena?

= What is Harry Potter Canon?: The Novels vs. Other Sources (Schoolbooks, Interviews, Film)

Additional proposals are welcome, and we encourage members of the professional, academic, and fandom communities to participate.
 

D. Call for Papers for a panel on Eudora Welty at the American Literature Association annual meeting
 
The Eudora Welty Society is calling for paper to be delivered at its panel "Disclosing The Secret in Eudora Welty’s Fiction and Photography" at the American Literature Association Conference in Boston May 22-25, 2003.

"The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then; one secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell, and the substitute secret when nakedly exposed

is often the more appalling."

--Eudora Welty, "Listening," One Writer’s Beginnings The topic refers to several ideas of the secret:

- to Welty’s patterns of revealing and exposing while holding back and obscuring

- to her interest in revelation of the unspoken and to the images repeatedly associated with the revelation

- to her discussions of and uses of mystery

- to specific secrets in specific fictions and/or the photography.

Send proposals of 500 words to pollack@bucknell.edu by November 11, 2002.

Expressions of interest are welcome ASAP.


2. A CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS TO A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS
 

Alfred Lopez, author of Posts and Pasts: A Study of Postcolonialism (SUNY), is seeking two or three strong essays to round out a collection to be entitled Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader. The volume will examine the interrelations between whiteness and the history of European colonialism, as well as the status of whiteness in the contemporary postcolonial world. The volume in its final form will constitute a major contribution to both postcolonial studies and whiteness studies. A major scholarly press is awaiting submission of the full MS for review.

In its final form, Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader will present a range of critical and theoretical responses to two fundamental questions. First: What happens to whiteness after empire? What transformations, for example, does the nation’s self-image undergo when former colonial subjects return to London or Paris as citizens of the erstwhile Mother Country? How do those cultural processes resemble—and how do they diverge from—those experienced by whites of the former oppressing class in South Africa who remain behind in the post-apartheid state, to live and work alongside the newly empowered black majority? What happens to whiteness, in other words, after it loses its colonial privileges?

The volume’s second central question is perhaps more poignant and difficult: To what extent do white cultural norms or imperatives remain imbedded in the postcolonial or post-independence state a part—acknowledged or not—of the colonial legacy? Here we may think of any number of colonial-era discourses and practices, from the adoption of the erstwhile mother tongue (whether English, Spanish, or French) as the new national language, to the persistence of color-based socioeconomic caste structures in former colonies such as Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. These examples and many others point to the stubborn persistence of whiteness as a cultural norm in many of the postcolonial world’s official and unofficial cultural practices. Each of the volume’s contributors will approach and examine some aspect of these two central questions: of, on the one hand, whiteness’s radically altered status in the postcolonial world, and on the other its lingering (if not always acknowledged) influence.

Send 1-2 pp. proposals by October 31 to: Alfred Lopez, Department of English, Florida International University, University Park, DM 453, Miami FL 33015; or email proposals to<lopezal@fiu.edu>.

--

Al Lopez (lopezal@fiu.edu)
English Department
Florida International University


3.     CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS TO PEER-REVIEWED (I.E., REFEREED) JOURNALS
 

a. Generalist (Papers on Language and Literature)
4.    ABSTRACT FOR CONFERENCE PRESENTATION (USED FOR PRELIMINARY SUBMISSION) 5. CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
     

    White Noise and Underworld: The Image and Afterimage of the Cold War

    As the year 2001 draws near, the first post-Cold War decade also comes to a close, a situation whose numerical convenience encourages retrospective analysis of the lessons learned (or not learned) in the intervening years. With the gradual fading of the binary political competition between the United States and Soviet Union, a new world-view has arisen that neither affords the seeming logical simplicity of the moral dichotomy that defined the Cold War nor trembles with the pervasive gloom brought about by the apocalyptic policies of nuclear diplomacy. The philosophical and political landscape of the post-Cold War world is dominated by instability, from the economic upheaval threatened by the 1997 Asian economic crisis, to regional conflicts with global significance, such as NATO’s 1999 intervention in the Kosovo crisis or the resurgent hostilities in the Middle East. Amidst its greatest period of sustained economic growth, the United States has witnessed bitter political infighting at the national level and localized outbreaks of violence such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the Columbine shootings that allude to unacknowledged disturbances in the ostensibly healthy national psyche. The states of the former Soviet Union, most prominently among them Russia, have likewise proceeded stumblingly in their efforts to move away from the unpleasant past represented by the Cold War.

    While only a small and relatively reactionary minority advocates a return to the global politics of the Cold War, the tumultuous situation of today hints at a lingering social anxiety resembling the psychological aftereffects of trauma. Given the nuclear tension of varying intensity that existed from 1949, when the Soviets successfully exploded their first atomic bomb, until 1991, when the Cold War effectively ended, this cultural trauma is perhaps understandable, especially given the exalted (and exaggerated) rhetorical edifice of the "New World Order" that was erected atop the rubble of the Berlin Wall and those innumerable toppled statues of Lenin. If the initial American cultural response to the end of the Cold War was understandably celebratory (if perhaps overly self-congratulatory), it also lacked much substantive inquiry into the potentially deleterious after-effects of nearly fifty years beneath the nuclear Sword of Damocles. Although nuclear historian Paul Boyer has rightly asserted that "the federal government in the late 1980s and early 1990s did not downplay nuclear dangers with soothing propaganda about civil defense or the atom’s peacetime uses" as it had in the 1950s, neither did it question the strategy that purportedly "won" the Cold War. The rhetorical and political distortions that were used to justify both the exorbitantly expensive arms race and the moralistic sociology of the Cold War were left largely unexamined, except perhaps for overt instances of overkill such as McCarthyism.

    Don DeLillo, however, had begun diagnosing the cultural malignancies caused by the Cold War well in advance of its end. Ever since 1972, when he deliberately confused the languages of nuclear warfare and football in his novel End Zone, DeLillo has speculated about the possible lasting ramifications of the mentality engendered by the Cold War on the collective conscience of America. The progress of this speculation reaches its heights in two novels whose publication brackets the end of the Cold War by six years on either side, 1985’s White Noise and 1997’s Underworld. In the former, DeLillo offers a portrait of the numbing and dehumanizing effects of the insidious fear of death that accompanied the Cold War in a wide context. As Joseph Dewey compellingly argues in his 1990 study In a Dark Time, DeLillo accomplishes this by exposing the panoply of ineffectual linguistic strategies that American culture offered up as both palliative and justification for unsettling concepts such as the "balance of terror" deterrence theory. Underworld, on the other hand, takes the reader through virtually the entire history of the arms race in order to trace the development of Cold War cultural paranoia in its entirety. More importantly, though, the book also makes clear the ways in which this condition outlives the end of the Cold War in much the same manner as the actual detritus of the Cold War does. From Klara Sax’s abandoned B-52’s to the nuclear waste whose disposal Nick Shay oversees, the Cold War’s by-products still dominate the physical world of the book, and serves as a powerful symbol of the psychological and sociological "garbage" that remains for the characters in the book to deal with even as the "New World Order" has been proclaimed.

    Paul Maltby’s 1991 work Dissident Postmodernists is among the host of books that have arisen in the wake of the Cold War that have retroactively attempted to identify the most powerful forces at work in the cultural and linguistic landscape of post-war America. Maltby defines language as "a medium of social integration" and claims that such a status "calls for attention not only to the ideological inflection of everyday and socially privileged forms of language, but also to other components of the ‘discursive field’ like the ensemble of institutions and apparatuses that regulate the use of language." Some of the components he mentions are "the erosion of the public sphere; the enlargement of the state’s propaganda agencies; the impact of technical rationality on language; and the spread of conceptually impoverished discourses that impede critical reflection on society," all of which can be connected in some way to the process of "fighting" the Cold War. He explicitly states that these four factors "have all been explained in the context of the restructuring and growth of capitalist economies in their postwar [i.e., Cold War] phase," thereby explicitly linking these socio-linguistic developments with American economic concerns.

    Even before the Cold War ended, though, critics such as Jacques Derrida had already formulated a mode of cultural critique that was suitable for the linguistically deformed nuclear age. Derrida’s 1984 article, "No Apocalypse, Not Now," contains a commentary on the relationship between language and the nuclear mindset of the Cold War. He claims that nuclear war can be perceived as "a pure invention: in the sense in which it is said that a myth, an image, a fiction, a utopia, a rhetorical figure, a fantasy, a phantasm, are inventions." In directly linking the potential annihilation of humanity with literary and linguistic creations, Derrida does not intend to diminish the gravity of the nuclear threat; rather, his commentary makes clear the immense power contained within the language that provides the philosophical justification for the Cold War, language that he repeatedly identifies as a quasi-literary construct:

    You will perhaps find it shocking to find the nuclear issue reduced to a fable, but then I haven’t simply said that. I have recalled that a nuclear war is for the time being a fable, that is something one can only talk about. But who can fail to recognize the massive "reality" of nuclear weaponry and of the terrible forces of destruction that are being stockpiled and capitalized everywhere, that are coming to constitute the very movement of capitalization.

    In his Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age, J. Fisher Solomon offers a gloss of Derrida’s assertions in this regard, writing that "Derrida presents us with two peculiarly interrelated phenomena":

    On the one hand, we have the historical "reality" of a nuclear arms race; on the other we have a "fabulous" representation of a war that has never happened. But the two are difficult to separate from each other, for the "reality" of the arms race has itself been predicated upon the "fiction" of the war. Our nuclear stockpile has been stockpiled in the name of the war, and in the name of deterring that war.

    Such duplicitous reasoning forms the basis for the maintenance of the Cold War as a continuation of wartime ways of thinking. As Stephen Miller writes:

    [T]he military-industrial complex was able to re-use the dire good-versus-evil confrontation of World War II…[to create] a prevalent illusory world outlook that, with the Soviet Union’s explosion of its first atomic bomb in 1949, was paradoxically predicated on the ‘bottom line’ need to prevent the world’s nuclear destruction through the stockpiling of thermonuclear devices and the unacknowledged public works project of defense spending.

    Derrida, Solomon, and Miller all point out the ways in which reality is essentially dictated by "fabulous," "fallacious," and "illusory" language. When conflated with Maltby’s linkage of Cold War policy and late capitalist economics, a milieu emerges that is reminiscent of that found in the town of Blacksmith, where most of the action of White Noise takes place.

    [CONTINUES FOR ROUGHLY ANOTHER 4 PAGES – TOTAL ORAL READING TIME, 19 MINS.]


     
6. ARTICLE SUBMISSION FOR REFEREED JOURNAL PUBLICATION
DeLillo’s White Noise and Underworld:
Diagnosis of and Prognosis for Cold War Cultural Trauma

The advent of the year 2001 brought down the curtain on the first post-Cold War decade, a situation whose numerical convenience encourages retrospective analysis of the cultural and political developments that occurred during that period. With the disappearance of the binary political competition between the United States and Soviet Union, a new worldview has arisen that neither affords the logical simplicity of the moral dichotomy that defined the Cold War, nor trembles with the pervasive anxiety brought about by the inherently hazardous practice of nuclear diplomacy. The philosophical and political landscape of the post-Cold War world is dominated by volatility, from the economic upheaval threatened by the 1997 Asian economic crisis, to regional conflicts with global significance, such as NATO’s 1999 intervention in the Kosovo crisis or the persistent hostilities in the Middle East. Amidst its greatest period of sustained economic growth, the United States has witnessed bitter political infighting at the national level and localized outbreaks of violence such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the Columbine shootings that seemingly allude to disturbances in the ostensibly healthy national psyche. The states of the former Soviet Union have likewise proceeded erratically in their efforts to move away from the unpleasant past of the Cold War.

While only a small and relatively reactionary minority in either the United States or the former Soviet Union advocates a return to the anxiety-inducing geopolitics of the Cold War, the tumultuous situation of today hints at a lingering social anxiety that resembles the psychological aftereffects of trauma. Given the nuclear tension of varying intensity that existed from 1949, when the Soviets successfully exploded their first atomic bomb, until 1991, when the Cold War effectively ended with the demise of the Soviet Union, the sources of this cultural trauma are not difficult ones to trace. Such a diagnosis becomes even more credible in light of the shortcomings of the exalted (and exaggerated) rhetorical edifice of the "New World Order" that was erected by the Cold War’s "victors" atop the rubble of the Berlin Wall and innumerable toppled statues of Lenin. If the initial American cultural response to the end of the Cold War was understandably celebratory (if perhaps overly self-congratulatory), it also largely lacked substantive inquiry into the potentially deleterious after-effects of nearly fifty years beneath the nuclear Sword of Damocles.

Don DeLillo, however, had begun diagnosing the cultural malignancies caused by the Cold War well in advance of its end. Ever since 1972, when he deliberately confused the languages of nuclear warfare and football in his novel End Zone, DeLillo has speculated about the possible lasting ramifications of the mentality engendered by the Cold War on the collective conscience of America. The progress of this speculation reaches its heights in two novels whose publication brackets the end of the Cold War by six years on either side, 1985’s White Noise and 1997’s Underworld. In the former, DeLillo offers a portrait of the numbing and dehumanizing effects of the insidious fear of death that accompanied the Cold War in a wide context. As Joseph Dewey compellingly argues in his In a Dark Time (1990), DeLillo accomplishes this by exposing the panoply of ineffectual linguistic strategies that American culture offered up as both palliative and justification for unsettling concepts such as the "balance of terror" deterrence theory. Underworld, on the other hand, takes the reader through virtually the entire history of the arms race in order to trace the development of Cold War angst in its entirety. More importantly, though, Underworld also makes clear the ways in which this condition outlives the end of the Cold War in much the same manner as the actual detritus of the Cold War does. From Klara Sax’s abandoned B-52’s to the nuclear waste whose disposal Nick Shay oversees, the Cold War’s by-products still dominate the physical world of the book, and serve as a powerful symbol of the psychological and sociological "garbage" that remains for the characters in the book to deal with even as the "New World Order" has been proclaimed.

For more than thirty years, historian/psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has examined the aftereffects of the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. His Death in Life (1969) was the first extensive study of the psychological ramifications of the bomb on its Japanese survivors. More relevant to consideration of DeLillo’s fiction is his 1995 work (co-authored with Greg Mitchell) Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, which puts forth the argument that a combination of governmental dis- and/or misinformation coupled with collective societal aversion to face up to the intricate and often unpleasant historical ramifications of the bomb’s use led to "a collective form of psychic numbing" among the American populace. Lifton and Mitchell claim that the concerted official effort to

justify the use of the bomb on ethical grounds, to hide its grotesque effects on people, and to deny the weapon’s revolutionary significance… represented an inability to confront the full truth of Hiroshima, an insufficient recognition in our policies and our attitudes that nothing was the same after Hiroshima—that human survival was now at issue.
 
  This national inability to confront the reality of life in the nuclear age is for Lifton and Mitchell reminiscent of the reaction of patients to a potentially traumatic medical condition: [W]e construct what Edith Wyschogrod calls a "cordon sanitaire" around Hiroshima—a barrier designed to prevent the spread of a threatening disease, the "illness" that we block off in his case being what we did in Hiroshima. That cordon sanitaire was transmitted, as official policy, throughout American society. One was supposed to be numbed to Hiroshima. Extending their medical analogy to post-Hiroshima society, Lifton and Mitchell argue that this numbing is only a superficial and fleeting balm against the complex assortment of anxieties that the bomb unleashed in its aftermath. The net result of this "psychic numbing" is that the Cold War became, in essence, a forty-plus-year period of denial, a stage that must be transcended before recovery from trauma can occur.

Although nuclear historian Paul Boyer has rightly asserted that "the federal government in the late 1980s and early 1990s did not downplay nuclear dangers with soothing propaganda about civil defense or the atom’s peacetime uses" as it had in the 1950s (when the process of "numbing" that Lifton and Mitchell describe was in full stride), neither did it openly question the strategy that purportedly "won" the Cold War. In fact, the exact opposite was generally true. The rhetorical and political distortions that were used to justify both the exorbitantly expensive arms race and the uncomplicatedly moralistic sociology of the Cold War were left largely unexamined, except perhaps for obvious instances of overkill such as McCarthyism. This lack of collective societal scrutiny resulted in a process of psychological convalescence that was considerably more private in nature, and thus more idiosyncratic in both its duration and its conclusions.

As individuals reviewed the events of the post-WWII era without the innately nationalistic and patriotic context of the Cold War, many of them began to perceive the contradictions and ambiguities within American societal and political behavior with an increasingly less acquiescent attitude. Writing in 1993, historian H. W. Brands presciently argued that one of the Cold War’s most lasting results was a profound sense of disillusionment, both domestic and internationally, concerning the uniqueness and virtue of the United States:

The chronic deficits that were a primary legacy of [American Cold War] military spending prevented the federal government from addressing many of the serious problems that crowded in on the country. Perhaps worst of all, American leaders, sometimes without the knowledge of the people, sometimes with the people’s approval, consistently cut moral corners in the Cold War, contradicting the ideals America was supposed to be defending. In 1945, nearly all Americans and probably a majority of interested foreigners had looked on the United States as a beacon shining the way to a better future for humanity, one in which ideals mattered more than tanks. During the next forty years, American leaders succeeded in convincing many Americans and all but a few foreigners that the United States could be counted on to act pretty much as great powers always have. If Americans felt ambivalent about their victory over the Soviet Union, they had reason to. Starting with the sharp internal divisions brought about by the Vietnam War, questions regarding the motives of American idealism (and the often angry rejoinders they provoked) poisoned the cultural climate of the United States to an extent that the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election seems almost like an unavoidable consequence. In large part, this increasingly antagonistic society is a result of the unpredictability in coming to grips with the broader cultural ramifications of the Cold War on a person-by-person basis.

Paul Maltby’s Dissident Postmodernists (1991) is among the host of books that have arisen in the wake of the Cold War that have retroactively attempted to identify the most powerful forces at work in the cultural and linguistic landscape of post-war America. Maltby defines language as "a medium of social integration" and claims that such a status "calls for attention not only to the ideological inflection of everyday and socially privileged forms of language, but also to other components of the ‘discursive field’ like the ensemble of institutions and apparatuses that regulate the use of language." Some of the components he mentions are "the erosion of the public sphere; the enlargement of the state’s propaganda agencies; the impact of technical rationality on language; and the spread of conceptually impoverished discourses that impede critical reflection on society," all of which can be connected in some way to the process of "fighting" the Cold War and simultaneously to maintaining the numbed (and thus unquestioning) attitude toward matters atomic. He states that these four factors "have all been explained in the context of the restructuring and growth of capitalist economies in their postwar [i.e., Cold War] phase," thereby explicitly linking these sociolinguistic developments with American economic concerns.

Even before the Cold War ended, though, critics such as Jacques Derrida had already formulated a mode of cultural assessment that was suitable for the linguistically deformed nuclear age. Derrida’s 1984 article, "No Apocalypse, Not Now," contains a commentary on the relationship between language and the nuclear mindset of the Cold War. He claims that nuclear war can be perceived as "a pure invention: in the sense in which it is said that a myth, an image, a fiction, a utopia, a rhetorical figure, a fantasy, a phantasm, are inventions." By directly linking the potential annihilation of humanity with literary and linguistic creations, Derrida does not intend to diminish the gravity of the nuclear threat; rather, his commentary makes clear the immense power contained within the language that provides the philosophical justification for the Cold War, language that he repeatedly identifies as a quasi-literary construct:

You will perhaps find it shocking to find the nuclear issue reduced to a fable, but then I haven’t simply said that. I have recalled that a nuclear war is for the time being a fable, that is something one can only talk about. But who can fail to recognize the massive "reality" of nuclear weaponry and of the terrible forces of destruction that are being stockpiled and capitalized everywhere, that are coming to constitute the very movement of capitalization. In his Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age (1988), J. Fisher Solomon offers a gloss of Derrida’s assertions in this regard, claiming that "Derrida presents us with two peculiarly interrelated phenomena": On the one hand, we have the historical "reality" of a nuclear arms race; on the other we have a "fabulous" representation of a war that has never happened. But the two are difficult to separate from each other, for the "reality" of the arms race has itself been predicated upon the "fiction" of the war. Our nuclear stockpile has been stockpiled in the name of the war, and in the name of deterring that war. Such reasoning forms the basis for the maintenance of the Cold War as a continuation of wartime ways of thinking, a practice that Stephen Miller notes is teeming with opportunities for exploitation: [T]he military-industrial complex was able to re-use the dire good-versus-evil confrontation of World War II…[to create] a prevalent illusory world outlook that, with the Soviet Union’s explosion of its first atomic bomb in 1949, was paradoxically predicated on the ‘bottom line’ need to prevent the world’s nuclear destruction through the stockpiling of thermonuclear devices and the unacknowledged public works project of defense spending. Derrida, Solomon, and Miller all point out the ways in which reality is essentially dictated by "fabulous," "fallacious," and "illusory" language. When conflated with Maltby’s linkage of Cold War policy and late capitalist economics, a sociolinguistic milieu emerges that is reminiscent of that found in the town of Blacksmith, where most of the action of White Noise takes place.

[CONTINUES FOR ROUGHLY ANOTHER 16 PAGES]