Why, Timothy Melley asks, have paranoia and conspiracy theory
become such prominent features of postwar American culture? In
Empire of Conspiracy, Melley explores the recent growth of
anxieties about thought-control, assassination, political
indoctrination, stalking, surveillance, and corporate and
government plots. At the heart of these developments, he believes,
lies a widespread sense of crisis in the way Americans think about
human autonomy and individuality. Nothing reveals this crisis more
than the remarkably consistent form of expression that Melley calls
"agency panic" -- an intense fear that individuals can be shaped or
controlled by powerful external forces. Drawing on a broad range of
forms that manifest this fear -- including fiction, film,
television, sociology, political writing, self-help literature, and
cultural theory -- Melley provides a new understanding of the
relation between postwar American literature, popular culture, and
cultural theory.
Empire of Conspiracy offers insightful new readings of texts
ranging from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to the Unabomber "Maniffesto,
" from Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders to recent addition
discourse, and from the "stalker" novels of Margaret Atwood and
Diane Johnson to the conspiracy fictions of Thomas Pynchon, William
Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Kathy Acker. Throughout, Melley finds
recurrent anxieties about the power of large organizations to
control human beings. These fears, he contends, indicate the
continuing appeal of a form of individualism that is no longer
wholly accurate or useful, but that still underpins a national
fantasy, of freedom from social control.
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