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- Title
Privacy, Literature, and Public Discourse.
- Authors
Rosen, David; Santesso, Aaron
- Abstract
In the last few decades, something has changed about how Americans conceive of privacy, which has had consequences for how writers address their publics: how writers write. This essay argues that rapidly evolving and expanding surveillance regimes have profoundly affected our sense of where the private life begins and ends and what can or cannot be concealed from others. Discourses characterized by fragmentation, opacity, and indirection have become both a means by which we communicate information about ourselves to the larger world and a mimetic representation of how that surveillance-mediated world often appears to us. Literature has played a crucial role in these transformations and has served as a laboratory for many of these emerging discourses. This essay focuses on two recent and contrasting cohorts of American writers: a slightly older group of authors who saw the sacrifice of individual privacy as having catastrophic implications for liberal democracy, and a younger group whose views of privacy and communication were, on the whole, less panicked and more tactical. The essay concludes by considering what happens when rhetorical modes meant primarily to preserve the private self reenter the public sphere and assert themselves within a civil-minded conversation.
- Subjects
HOW To (Poem); CARLSON-Wee, Anders; 21ST century American poetry; NATION, The (Periodical); CULTURAL appropriation; BLACK English; ENGLISH language -- Variation; DEBATE in mass media; PRIVACY
- Publication
American Literary History, 2020, Vol 32, Issue 3, p535
- ISSN
0896-7148
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/alh/ajaa016