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Alan Nadel

Research Interests:
Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Literature and Culture
Film
Literary Theory
Race Theory
Availability

Office Hours Fall 2018: T 3-4

Education

Ph.D. Rutgers University

Research

Areas of Specialty:

  • Post-WWII American literature and culture
  • American Film and Television
  • Cold War Studies
  • American Studies, with an emphasis on the representation of race
Selected Publications:

 

BOOKS

  • Demographic Angst: Cultutal Narratives and American Films of the 1950s. Rutgers UP, 2018.
  • The Theatre of August Wilson. Bloomsbury/Methuen, 2018.
  • Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity. UP Kansas, 2005.
  • Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan's America. Rutgers UP, 1997.
  • Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age.  Duke UP, 1995.
  • Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon. U Iowa P, 1988; paperback, 1991.
  • (Co-Editor) The Men Who Knew Too Much: Alfred Hitchcock and Henry James. (Susan Griffin, Co-Editor).
  • (Editor) August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle. U Iow P, 2010.
  • (Editor.) May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson. U Iowa P, 1994.

PRIZE-WINNING PUBLICATIONS

  • "God's Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War 'Epic'." PMLA, May 1993, 415-430 (winner of the Modern Language Association 1993 William Riley Parker Prize).
  • "Reading the Body: Alice Walker's Meridian and the Archeology of Self." Modern Fiction Studies, Spring 1988, 55-67 (winner of 1988 "Margaret Church MFS Memorial Prize").
  • "Dislogdings." Sewanee Review, Winter 2018. (Winner of the 2018 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize.)

RECENT ARTICLES (since 2012)

“Trump’s Dog, Reagan’s Whistle, and the Republican Party Core.” the A-Line: a journal of progressive thought, Summer 2021(online, 2000 words).

“Reading August Wilson’s Character and His Characters: A Suggestive Introduction.” August Wilson Journal, Summer, 2019 (online, 3000 words).

“From the Industrial Unconscious to the Cinematic to the Televisual to the Networked.” Arizona Quarterly, Summer 2019, 23-36.

“August Wilson, Jazz Structure, and the Historical Record” Approaches to Teaching August Wilson, Sandra Shannon and Sandra Richards, eds. New York: MLA Publications, 2016, 62-68.

“Alfred Hitchcock.” In Fifty Hollywood Directors, Yvonne Tasker and Suzanne Leonard, eds., Routledge P, 2015, 118-127.

“Cold War Culture at the Mid-Twentieth Century.” Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature, Brian McHale and Len Platt, eds. Cambridge UP, 2015.

 “Romantic Intrigue, Global Farce, and the UN:  Auctioning Cold War Intimacy in ‘North by Northwest’.” The Cambridge Companion to Hitchcock, Jonathan Freedman, ed., Cambridge UP, 2015, 161-179.

 “LOST in the Aftermath of 9/11: Survivor Meets Club Med.” In Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism, John Duvall and Robert Marzec, eds., Johns Hopkins UP, 2015, 118-141.

“’We—He and Us—Should Confederate’: Intruder in the Dust, the Dixiecrat Campaign, and Faulkner’s Cold War Agenda.” In Fifty Years After Faulkner, Jay Watson and Ann Abadie, eds., UP of Mississippi, 2015, 200-212.

 “Sayonara, Teahouse of the August Moon, and the Cold War Re-“Opening” of Japan.” In 1952-2012: The American Legacy in Japan Sixty Years after the Occupation, Duccio Basosi et al. eds. Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2015, 141-155.  

“’We—He and Us—Should Confederate’: Intruder in the Dust, the Dixiecrat Campaign, and Faulkner’s Cold War Agenda.” In Fifty Years After Faulkner, Jay Watson and Ann Abadie, eds., UP of Mississippi, 2015, 200-212.

Sayonara, Teahouse of the August Moon, and the Cold War Re-“Opening” of Japan.” In 1952-2012: The American Legacy in Japan Sixty Years after the Occupation, Duccio Basosi et al. eds. Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2015, 141-155.  

“Neoliberalism, “Magical Thinking” and Silver Linings Playbook” (Diane Negra co-author). Narrative, October 2014, 312-332.

“What Nanda Knew: A Truth not Universally Acknowledged in The Awkward Age.” In: Transforming Henry James, Donatella Izzo, et. al, eds., Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013.

“The Empire Strikes Out: Star Wars (IV, V, VI) and the Advent of Reaganism.” In American Literature and Culture in the Age of the Cold War, Steven Belleto and Danial Grausam, eds. U Iowa P, 2012, 187-208.

REPRINTED ARTICLES

“Television, Reality, and Cold War Citizenship.” In Tube Talk: Big Ideas in Television. Chicago: The Great Books Foundation, 2017, 237-259.

"A Whole New (Disney) World Order: Aladdin, Atomic Power, and the Muslim Middle East." In Race and Gender in American Film. Pearson Custom Publishing, August, 2009 (7500 words).

“Ralph Ellison and the American Canon.” Novels for Students, Vol. 21, Gale Publications, May 2005.

"Roethke, Wilbur and the Vision of the Child: Romantic and Augustan in Modern Verse." [Excerpt on Richard Wilber], in Poetry Criticism, Vol. 51, Gale Publications, December 2003.

"Roethke, Wilbur and the Vision of the Child: Romantic and Augustan in Modern Verse." [Excerpt on Theodore Roethke], in Poetry Criticism, Vol. 52, Gale Publications, December 2003.

"Boundaries, Logistics, and Identity: The Property of Metaphor in Fences and Joe Turner's Come and Gone." In Literature and Ourselves: Thematic Introduction for Readers and Writers, Gloria Mason Henderson, William Day, and Sandra Stevenson Waller, eds., Longman Press, 2003, 308-314.

“Rhetoric, Sanity, and the Cold War: Holden Caulfield’s Testimony.” In Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Harold Bloom, ed. Chelsea House, 2001.

"Invisible Man, Huck, and Jim." In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations Series. Chelsea House, 2000, 153-178.

"Failed Cultural Narratives: Post-WWII America and the Story of Democracy." In: National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, Donald Pease, ed., Duke UP, 1994.

"Reading the Body: Meridian and the Archeology of Self." Reprinted in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds., Amistad, 1993, 155-167. 

"Marianne Moore and the Art of Delineation."  Excerpted, Poetry Criticism. Gale Publications, 1992.

"Holden Caulfield and the Cold War." In Holden Caulfield, Harold Bloom, ed. Chelsea House, 1990.

POETRY IN:

Bitterroot, Cul-de-Sac, Georgia Review, Home Planet News, Journal of New Jersey Poets, New England Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Sycamore Review, The Shore Review.