“All the time, somebody listens in”: mirror images of social paranoia in twentieth-century American and Soviet literature

Abstract

Emphasising the manner in which literary texts often serve to express the collective hopes and fears of their respective cultures or communities, my research explores the representation of social paranoia in a selection of Cold War American and Soviet Russian novels. Although the antagonism between these two opposing superpowers, and their struggle for ideological supremacy, shaped the course of twentieth- century international relations, my research proposes that an examination of the literary and cultural output of these two apparently irreconcilable socio-political systems reveals a parallel preoccupation with a number of typically paranoid concerns. These shared anxieties include the unsettling reality of state surveillance and similar methods of social control, the ever-present threat of enemy infiltration, and the politicisation of science which resulted in the terror of the Nuclear Age. Indeed, much of the fiction produced in Russia from the Stalinist era onwards and in the U.S. during the Cold War ...