Nathaniel Landry

Nate Landry's dissertation--Left: Modes of Disaffiliation in Cold War Literature--comes at the question of political commitment in fiction via its opposite. It focuses on the work of several writers (including Elizabeth Hardwick, Doris Lessing, and Mary McCarthy) with a biography involving some period of explicit political commitment, followed by the disavowal or severing of such attachments. Attending to the way that such commitments--and their always and only partial dismantling--structure or preoccupy these writers' work, Left tracks literary disaffiliation not as it commonly appears in Cold War historiography as a moment or transition, but as a style and a narrative telos in itself.