eBook

The Covert Sphere

Melley, Timothy

2012

Overview

In December 2010 the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acknowledged that it was providing major funding for thirteen episodes of Eagle Four-a new Afghani television melodrama based loosely on the blockbuster U.S. series24. According to an embassy spokesperson, Eagle Four was part of a strategy aimed at transforming public suspicion of security forces into something like awed respect. Why would a wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national security as a concept and a transformation of democracy. InThe Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new cultural imaginary, \"the covert sphere.\" One of the surprising consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely substantially on fiction to \"know,\" or imagine, their nation's foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state was instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty that has plagued American society ever since-and, Melley argues, that would eventually find its fullest expression in postmodernism. The Covert Spheretraces these consequences from the Korean War through the War on Terror, examining how 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. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular entertainments-fromThe Manchurian Candidatethrough24-as well as influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien, and many others.

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Subject: 20th century / 21st century / American / American fiction / American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism / AMERICAN STUDIES / american suspicion / cia / clandestine organizations / cold war and literature / Espionage in literature / History / History and criticism / institutional secrecy / Intelligence & Espionage / korean war / Language & Literature / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General / LITERARY STUDIES / Literature and history / Literature and history -- United States / National security / National security -- Social aspects -- United States / Political aspects / POLITICAL SCIENCE / political theory / Popular culture / Popular culture -- Political aspects -- United States -- History -- 20th century / Popular culture -- Political aspects -- United States -- History -- 21st century / public policy / Secrecy in literature / Social aspects / Spy stories, American / Spy stories, American -- History and criticism / Terrorism in literature / United States / us foreign policy / war on terror / World politics in literature
• ISBN: 080145123X, 9780801451232, 9780801478536, 0801478537