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The evocation of a marginalized presence through memory in these novels and films, by subjects in a post-1980s present remembering postwar WWCPC rural locales,

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produces a counter-narrative to the dominant national imaginary. In this way, the subject matter in these novels and filmic adaptations provides another voice for the larger cultural memory within the U.S., particularly as this cultural memory recalls various facets of the postwar period.

A cultural memory, as defined by Marita Sturken, is a “field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history” (1). This negotiation implies a desire to lay claim to a particular view of the past, but it also implies that one has the wherewithal to lay this claim in the present. It should come as no surprise, then, that a dominant perspective may be centralized through a cultural memory that helps define a particular national identity (see also Olick, where the role of memory and nation building is discussed in different contexts). However, Sturken’s definition of cultural memory also includes the possibility for competing voices to emerge, to contest and in turn to become part of this larger memory. In this way, the WWCPC rural memory narratives discussed here may be considered as one of the “stories” to be read in concert with the larger cultural memory that elides it.

These post-1980s novel-to-film adaptations are part of a larger trend towards remembering the postwar period in American society and culture that, specifically, attempts to assert the agency of a particular group of people. As theorists like Paul Grainge attest in relation to the representations of memory in cultural products like film,

“memory has become a powerful locus for the articulation of identity in the sphere of cultural imaginings” (Grainge, Memory). The focus on the postwar is also in line with a

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larger cultural impulse to remember that specific period. As Grainge points to in another context, the explosion of nostalgic cultural forms from the postwar on is part of a

“discourse of nostalgia” in our present culture (Monochrome 43-44), and scholars have also discussed this nostalgia for the postwar as found in other consumer practices (see Frank; Heath and Potter; T. Hines; Hurley). These diverse discussions seem to suggest that the nostalgia for the postwar goes beyond mere engagement with the past, instead allowing for a coextension of this past, even for those who had not lived through it.

Thomas Frank recognizes that the present fixation on the 1960s, for example, goes beyond nostalgia, becoming the formative influence on present U.S. culture: “For me and, I assume, for others my age, the sixties are the beginning of the present, the birthplace of the styles and tastes and values that define our world” (ix)²⁸. While the postwar era might be perceived and represented as a remembered past, that recent past — in Frank’s case the 1960s, although this can be attributed to the postwar generally (see Hines in regards to the “Populuxe” trend; see also Hurley) — continues to inform present norms and assumptions.

A study of the postwar period in light of these fictional memory discourses may thus help uncover the unsaid that exists within these norms and assumptions, particularly as this pertains to the representation of WWCPC rurality. In addition, these fictional representations of memory help address a gap in revisionist perspectives on the postwar period. While revisionist scholars have been concerned with filling in gaps in our

28See also Heath and Potter in regards to the continuing trend of countercultural consumer practices.

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understanding of postwar culture and society, WWCPC rurality is rarely directly

discussed, although a few examples do exist (see the chapter “The Hillbilly in the Living Room” in A. Harkins). Still, some aspects of this scholarship are relevant to my project.

For example, scholars have examined the ways in which class difference is figured in various postwar discourses, from literature to the social sciences, despite the mainstream rhetoric of classlessness in the period. In this scholarship, the focus on the individual and/or the family is seen by such scholars as indicative of an insular middle-class perspective eager to ignore larger social and cultural concerns (see Schaub, American;

Hoborek; L. May for a few examples).

This discussion of class is helpful in examining locales like the suburb, a cornerstone of the early postwar period and an important element in the dominant discourse I will be examining. For some theorists, suburbia was the physical embodiment of the insular middle-class (or, at least, the appearance of the middle-class)²⁹. For Clifford Clark, the ranch house was “seen as creating a unity with nature, but it was a unity that pictured nature as a tamed and open environment” (179). The ranch house, and the suburban developments modeled on it, became a physical indicator of a “protected suburban environment” removed from the chaotic (and low-class) urban centers from which these suburbanites sprang (179). Although Clark highlights the sense of security this “tamed”

nature created amidst a rapidly changing urban world, we could add WWCPC rurality as

29For a literary studies treatment of this idea, see Catherine Jurca.

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yet another threat emanating from this “nature” against which the suburbs were meant to protect.

In Chapter Two I foreground this WWCPC rural presence more fully in regards to some familiar topics tackled by revisionist scholars of the postwar period. I will touch upon such topics as suburbia and society; mobility to and from the sub/urbs (and out of the rural and into the urban); and, relatedly, the 1960s counterculture. These topics expose middle-classless white sub/urban conceptions, but using an interdiscursive reading we can also hear the WWCPC rural voices that have been left out and their potential to critique these mainstream norms.

Bringing out the ways in which WWCPC rurality was used in the postwar period to shore up the dominant norms that in turn elided them also helps us better see the

persistence of such views into the present. While the bulk of this dissertation analyzes the interplay between past and present in this regard through the analysis of literature

(Chapter Three), film adaptations (Chapter Four), and a broad discourse analysis of journalism and the social sciences post-1980s (Chapter Five), in the next chapter I turn to the postwar proper to examine dominant representations of WWCPC rurality as found in journalism and the social sciences of that period, while also seeking out the represented experiences of these places as most effectively recovered in historical revision and autobiography. Thus will begin the application of the framework set out in this chapter to my in-depth analysis of the interplay between dominant discourses and WWCPC rural counter-narratives in both the postwar and present.

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Chapter 2: Postwar Progress and Development: Conceptions of Space, Time and