Mourning the" Greatest Generation": Myth and History in Philip Roth's" American Pastoral"
SK Stanley - Twentieth Century Literature, 2005 - JSTOR
SK Stanley
Twentieth Century Literature, 2005•JSTORIn a 1973 interview about his satirical book The Great American Novel, Philip Roth describes
the 1960s as a" demythologizing decade" in which" the very nature of American things
yielded and collapsed overnight"(" Great American Novel" 90). A self-described member of
the" most propagandized generation"? a product of World War II rhetoric, Cold War
containment, and mass media? Roth at that point views the sixties in terms of a Cold War
battle over the realm of the social imaginaire, a struggle between the benign national myth of …
the 1960s as a" demythologizing decade" in which" the very nature of American things
yielded and collapsed overnight"(" Great American Novel" 90). A self-described member of
the" most propagandized generation"? a product of World War II rhetoric, Cold War
containment, and mass media? Roth at that point views the sixties in terms of a Cold War
battle over the realm of the social imaginaire, a struggle between the benign national myth of …
In a 1973 interview about his satirical book The Great American Novel, Philip Roth describes the 1960s as a" demythologizing decade" in which" the very nature of American things yielded and collapsed overnight"(" Great American Novel" 90). A self-described member of the" most propagandized generation"? a product of World War II rhetoric, Cold War containment, and mass media? Roth at that point views the sixties in terms of a Cold War battle over the realm of the social imaginaire, a struggle between the benign national myth of itself that a great power prefers to perpetuate, and the relentlessly insidious, very nearly demonic reality... that will not give an inch in behalf of that idealized mythology.(90)
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