Blast from the Past: Twilight of the Middle Class

[alice wellintown]

Mnntioned this some years back and Monroe included it in a recently
posted bibliography.

In The Twilight of the Middle Class, Andrew Hoberek challenges the
commonly held notion that post-World War II American fiction eschewed
the economic for the psychological or the spiritual. Reading works by
Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Flannery O'Connor,
Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and others, he shows how both the form
and content of postwar fiction responded to the transformation of the
American middle class from small property owners to white-collar
employees. In the process, he produces "compelling new accounts of
identity politics and postmodernism that will be of interest to anyone
who reads or teaches contemporary fiction."

The Epilogue, "The Postmodern Fallacy" is a discussion of DeLillo's
1982 novel, _The Names_.   Worth checking out for CIA themes and
Global Capitalism critique.

In any event, in his Introduction, although typical arcane, esoteric,
jargonized language makes for difficult reading, Hoberek constructs a
fairly convincing argument that can certainly apply to IV: economics
and class is central to post-war writing. The dense introduction
explains how the economy changed and what these changes meant to
workers. It's clear, from VL, AtD, IV, that P is working these ideas
into his works.