Look Back in Anger: The 1970s in Contemporary American Fiction

“Once dismissed,” in the words of Charles L. Ponce de Leon, “as the backwash of the tumultuous 1960s, an era of kitsch, self-indulgence and cultural ‘malaise’”, the 1970s have undergone a “dramatic reassessment” in recent years.” This dissertation aims to fill a gap in the new critical discourse of the 1970s by looking at what the contemporary American novel has to say about the decade. In this dissertation, I follow historians such as Judith Stein, who argue that 1970 is the “pivotal decade” of the post-war era because it set us on course toward our own age of unprecedented economic inequality. In this dissertation, I follow Stein in thinking if we hope to understand our current conjuncture of capitalism, we must do so by looking at the 1970s. I discuss the representation of the 1970s that emerges from a range of contemporary novels, such as Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document and Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. I focus in particular on these novels' depictions of leftism, radicalism, unions, feminism, art, and performance. I argue that the novel is a genre that is uniquely suited to making a sophisticated, structural critique of capitalism. I also look at memoirs written by 1970s leftists and radicals. Here, I am interested in the memoir in comparison to the novel, and the way the memoir genre obfuscates class analysis.