Novel Privacies: Surveillance and Enclosure in 1960s American Fiction

This dissertation presents three interrelated claims. First, that American novels of the 1960s exhibit a literary formation that I call enclosure. At the same time that they conspicuously display their characters’ subjection to various forms of surveillance, novelists from this period produce formal and thematic spaces that appear beyond the reach of other characters, the reader, and even, occasionally, the author. Second, that these enclosures constitute the American novel’s response to contemporary developments in surveillance technology, facilitated, in part, by the invention of the transistor in the late 1940s. The authors I analyze present the novel as a hopeful haven of privacy that persists even under the conditions of pervasive surveillance that these new technologies enable. Third, that there exists a reciprocity between these novelists’ turn to enclosure and contemporary changes in American privacy law. Each responds to the emergence and proliferation of audio bugs, peephole cameras, and even LSD by conceptualizing new forms of privacy, collapsing distinctions between mental content and physical spaces in images of enclosure. By bringing archival materials related to electronics miniaturization, government surveillance programs, and privacy law to bear on close readings of contemporary novels, this dissertation clarifies that underlying this new literary formation is a pursuit of individual enclosure in a world beset by paranoia and official acts of invasion. Each chapter examines the use of new formal techniques—or refashioned old ones—deployed to the ends of resisting, redirecting, accommodating to, or exploiting subjection to pervasive exposure. Novel Privacies thus tells a new story about the novel’s response to a quantitatively unprecedented and qualitatively distinct regime of surveillance.