Post45@Stanford

Kate Marshall and Loren Glass, Editors
Post45 Group, Editorial Committee

Post45 publishes groundbreaking new work on culture in the United States after the Second World War. The end of that war marked the dawn of the so-called "American Century," as U.S. capital and military power redrew the map of Europe and Asia and set in motion the dissolution of the old imperial order. These were years of unprecedented ambition, idealism, and arrogance, as the suddenly dominant United States set out to craft a new world abroad and at home. Now, as we face the waning of U.S. prestige and influence and confront new crises of confidence at home, the time is ripe for reassessing the terms though which the culture of the American Century has traditionally been understood. Above all, we reassess received models of literary inquiry and the canons that they have produced by asking basic questions about how to read and categorize American writing since 1945. But though the series gravitates toward literature, its objects of study are various, from the popular to the avant-garde, from novels, poems, and plays, to films, graphic arts, and computer-based forms. The assumptions governing work in this series are equally various; we welcome a range of approaches, so long as they question rather than reproduce the critical orthodoxies established during the postwar era. We are interested in formal and systemic analysis, whether it articulates the internal laws specific to one medium or illuminates structural relations and exchanges between a given medium and institutional practices beyond its ken. Throughout it all, we are drawn toward ambitious work that sets out to make sense of how U.S. culture participated in the rise and fall of the American Century.

Visit the series here.