American Studies ETDs

Publication Date

4-17-1972

Abstract

Since the Second World War, John Hersey has produced a sizeable body of work in both fiction and non-fiction. In 1950, a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a phenomenally successful and significant piece of journalism and a major American novel gave him the reputation for being one of America's most promising young writers. For the past twenty years, however, his work largely has been unacclaimed and major critics have excluded him from their discussions of the contemporary novel and contemporary culture. In general, his works have not received the close critical examination they deserve. This is partly because Hersey's complex attitude toward art, politics and culture have made him difficult to categorize. In his fiction Hersey demonstrates his journalistic proclivities through a Howellsian devotion to realistic portrayals and studies of society. However, there is also a strong romantic strain in his work that goes back to a nineteenth century American literary tradition of the romance that has been delineated by Richard Chase. For Hersey, the romance is a vehicle for the exploration and enunciation of ideas endemic to the American experience. Hersey's attitudes toward technology, the diminution of autonomy and independence, the rise of corporate values and repressive consciousness are in substantial agreement with such radical critics of society as Herbert Marcuse, Ivan Illich and Charles A. Reich. However, his ideas concerning the individual, freedom, responsibility and the self are relevant to discussions of freedom by Sartre, Camus, Tillich and modern existential psychoanalysts such as Rollo May and R. D. Laing. The depth and diversity of Hersey's interests has required a cross-disciplinary approach to his books involving comparisons with the works of these writers from various fields of political philosophy, psychology and existential philosophy. In general, I have found in Hersey's work a unique synthesis of radical, existential and literary visions. In his fiction Hersey's emphasis has not been on facts and events in themselves but on the ideas inundating the contemporary situation. States of mind are in the foreground of his concern, and this has tended to make him a writer of contemporary intellectual history as opposed to the designation he gave himself in 1949 as a writer of contemporary events. Hersey finds in American culture a tenebrous balance between freedom and repression. This balance is particularly precarious in modern times because of such forces as technology. Hersey, therefore, espouses a faith in education as part of a wider commitment to a dynamic and expanding individual and social consciousness as the means for sustaining freedom.

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

American Studies

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

American Studies

First Committee Member (Chair)

Joel M. Jones

Second Committee Member

Harold V. Rhodes

Third Committee Member

Joseph J. Fashing

Fourth Committee Member

Illegible

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