American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History

The United States today is afflicted with political alienation, militarized violence, institutionalized poverty, and social agony. Worst of all, perhaps, it is afflicted with chronic and acute ahistoricism. America insists on ignoring the context of its present dilemmas. It insists on forgetting what preceded the headlines of today and on denying continuity with history. It insists, in short, on its exceptionalism.American Utopia and Social Engineering sets out to correct this amnesia. It misses no opportunity to flesh out both the historical premises and the political promises behind the social policies and political events of the period. These interdisciplinary concerns provide, in turn, the framework for the analyses of works of American literature that mirror their times and mores.Novels considered include B.F. Skinner's Walden Two, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Bernard Malamud's God's Grace , Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome , and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America . Chapters include analyses of aspects of evolution and behavioral psychology, medicine and pharmacology, voting systems, parliamentary and referenda procedures, altruism, multi-level selection, chip-implant technology, and mirror neurons, yet are balanced by archival research that enriches the literary and historical context of the study.