Current Projects
I am currently completing the first of my Plan B Projects. An abstract of the project follows:
The critical literature of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 has thoroughly examined Bradbury’s use of metaphor and allegory. Additionally, recent criticism by Susan Spencer, Rafeeq McGiveron, and other scholars addresses the development of intellectual characters and the aspects of society that act upon them. However, critics largely ignore the unique cultural context of the American 1950s in which this novel is situated, which is consumed with mass culture and anti-intellectualism. This culture emphasized the contentment of the masses and rejected the intellectual pursuits of the individual as a response to Cold War anxieties. Rather than focusing on the use of metaphor and allegory, my essay illuminates the figure of the intellectual in the American 1950s through the analysis of the characters of Fahrenheit 451 in relation to twentieth-century intellectual history and theory. I argue that Fahrenheit 451 dramatizes the struggle between intellectualism and mass culture in the unique cultural moment of the American 1950s. This struggle can be seen through the juxtaposition of Captain Beatty, a conflicted character who is both well-read and an anti-intellectual, and the “book people,” a sub-culture that lives outside of the anti-intellectual society of Fahrenheit 451, complicates the struggle between mass culture and intellectualism, as both members of this juxtaposition are extremely well-read, but take strikingly different stances on intellectualism. I argue that Bradbury uses this juxtaposition to show that the distinction between the intellectual and the anti-intellectual may not be as clear as intellectuals of his time may have thought.