What do you think?
Rate this book
Gender and Culture Series
Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America
Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America explores the relationship between confessional poetry and constitutional privacy doctrine, both of which emerged at the end of the 1950s. While the public declarations of the Supreme Court and the private declamations of the lyric poet may seem unrelated, both express the upheavals in American notions of privacy that marked the Cold War era. Nelson situates the poetry and legal decisions as part of a far wider anxiety about privacy that erupted across the social, cultural, and political spectrum during this period. She explores the panic over the "death of privacy" aroused by broad changes in postwar culture: the growth of suburbia, the advent of television, the popularity of psychoanalysis, the arrival of computer databases, and the spectacles of confession associated with McCarthyism.
Examining this interchange between poetry and law at its most intense moments of reflection in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Deborah Nelson produces a rhetorical analysis of a privacy concept integral to postwar America's self-definition and to bedrock contradictions in Cold War ideology. Nelson argues that the desire to stabilize privacy in a constitutional right and the movement toward confession in postwar American poetry were not simply manifestations of the anxiety about privacy. Supreme Court justices and confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Sylvia Plath were redefining the nature of privacy itself. Close reading of the poetry alongside the Supreme Court's shifting definitions of privacy in landmark decisions reveals a broader and deeper cultural metaphor at work.
Examining this interchange between poetry and law at its most intense moments of reflection in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Deborah Nelson produces a rhetorical analysis of a privacy concept integral to postwar America's self-definition and to bedrock contradictions in Cold War ideology. Nelson argues that the desire to stabilize privacy in a constitutional right and the movement toward confession in postwar American poetry were not simply manifestations of the anxiety about privacy. Supreme Court justices and confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Sylvia Plath were redefining the nature of privacy itself. Close reading of the poetry alongside the Supreme Court's shifting definitions of privacy in landmark decisions reveals a broader and deeper cultural metaphor at work.
209 pages, Paperback
First published December 19, 2001
1 person is currently reading
34 people want to read
About the author
Deborah Nelson
3 books5 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Deborah Nelson is a professor in the English Dept. at the University of Chicago. From her faculty page on the UofC website:
My field is late twentieth-century U.S. culture and politics, what is known in shorthand as Post45 or Post War (to the confusion of many: which war?). I also am a founding member of the Post45 collective, which publishes an online journalPost45and a book series atStanford University Press. My interests in the field include American poetry, novels, essays, and plays; gender and sexuality studies; photography; autobiography and confessional writing; American ethnic literature; poetry and poetics; and Cold War history. I have been working recently on the immediate postwar moment, @1948, on which topic I and three colleagues ran a year-long, interdisciplinary Sawyer Seminar sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. My colleague Leela Gandhi and I co-edited a selection of papers presented in the seminar in a special issue of Critical Inquiry. In the fall of 2018, James Sparrow in the Department of History and I will curate an exhibit from the holdings of the Smart Museum on the @1948 moment.
This past spring my book, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, was published by the University of Chicago Press. Tough Enough focuses on these six women who are aligned with no single tradition but whose work coheres in a style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches. Tough Enough challenges the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. My first book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, examined the discourse of privacy beginning with its emergence asa topic of intense anxiety in the late 1950s. Pairing landmark Supreme Court decisions on the right to privacy with the investigation of privacy and private life in the work of the confessional poets, the book takes up these two discourses for their particularly subtle investigation of the language of privacy as the concept evolved over the next decades.
Deborah Nelson is a professor in the English Dept. at the University of Chicago. From her faculty page on the UofC website:
My field is late twentieth-century U.S. culture and politics, what is known in shorthand as Post45 or Post War (to the confusion of many: which war?). I also am a founding member of the Post45 collective, which publishes an online journalPost45and a book series atStanford University Press. My interests in the field include American poetry, novels, essays, and plays; gender and sexuality studies; photography; autobiography and confessional writing; American ethnic literature; poetry and poetics; and Cold War history. I have been working recently on the immediate postwar moment, @1948, on which topic I and three colleagues ran a year-long, interdisciplinary Sawyer Seminar sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. My colleague Leela Gandhi and I co-edited a selection of papers presented in the seminar in a special issue of Critical Inquiry. In the fall of 2018, James Sparrow in the Department of History and I will curate an exhibit from the holdings of the Smart Museum on the @1948 moment.
This past spring my book, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, was published by the University of Chicago Press. Tough Enough focuses on these six women who are aligned with no single tradition but whose work coheres in a style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches. Tough Enough challenges the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. My first book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, examined the discourse of privacy beginning with its emergence asa topic of intense anxiety in the late 1950s. Pairing landmark Supreme Court decisions on the right to privacy with the investigation of privacy and private life in the work of the confessional poets, the book takes up these two discourses for their particularly subtle investigation of the language of privacy as the concept evolved over the next decades.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 4, 2024
A purely original exploration of law and (confessional) lyric poetry in relation to each other within the framework of ‘privacy’ and ‘containment’. Useful for my research but my favourite nonetheless is the fourth chapter on Roe v Wade and the paradox of privacy - that is, the necessary confession of a woman to confirm the privacy of her decision, to her doctor. Really excellent read exploring the continually dying and renewing concept of privacy as it expands and diminishes.
April 23, 2013
"The cold war containment metaphor was not simply an expression of foreign policy, or domestic ideology, but a figure for the impossible incoherence of masculine autonomy. The power and mobility of the this metaphor of containment were equal only to the power and elasticity of the metaphor of intrusion -- the enemy within -- which conveyed the uncanny experience of finding one's borders already violated. The impossible purity of the internal space meant the perpetual breakdown and failure of the containment project." (xviii)
"This shift toward self-disclosure presents the mirror side of the 'death of privacy' debate: pronounced anxieties about the emerging culture of confession." (19)
"An emphasis on national context has obscured the extent to which so-called American norms of privacy were forged in a more specific local context: Boston." (42)
"In other words, the constitutional right to privacy represents a paradox: it both refused the logic of containment, which justified the intrusion into private life to protect that same privacy, and extended its logic by resting the right to privacy on the exceptional idealization of the home." (80)
"This shift toward self-disclosure presents the mirror side of the 'death of privacy' debate: pronounced anxieties about the emerging culture of confession." (19)
"An emphasis on national context has obscured the extent to which so-called American norms of privacy were forged in a more specific local context: Boston." (42)
"In other words, the constitutional right to privacy represents a paradox: it both refused the logic of containment, which justified the intrusion into private life to protect that same privacy, and extended its logic by resting the right to privacy on the exceptional idealization of the home." (80)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews