An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer
Andrew Gordon's 1980 study, grown from his Berkeley dissertation under Frederick Crews: a psychoanalytic reading of Mailer's fiction from The Naked and the Dead through The Armies of the Night, with a chapter on each novel, on The Man Who Studied Yoga and The Time of Her Time, and on Mailer beside Swift and Carlyle, arguing that sex, anality, violence, and power are the drives his books dream for America.
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An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer, by Andrew Gordon. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1980. 236 pp. ISBN 0-8386-2158-9 (cloth), 0-8386-3066-9 (paper).
Gordon’s book began as a dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, under Frederick Crews, and parts of chapters 2, 7, and 8 first appeared in Literature and Psychology. It reads Mailer’s fiction from The Naked and the Dead (1948) through The Armies of the Night (1968) as a series of dream books, “explorations of the deep psychic content of the mind of America,” whose recurring concerns are sex, anality, violence, and power and the connections among them in unconscious thought and conscious behavior. After an introduction that sets out the method and an opening chapter on Mailer’s debts to Freud and Reich, it gives a chapter each to The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore, “The Man Who Studied Yoga,” The Deer Park, “The Time of Her Time,” An American Dream, Why Are We in Vietnam?, and The Armies of the Night, and closes by setting Mailer’s excremental vision beside Swift’s and Carlyle’s. The book is published here in full as No. 2 of the Mailer Critical Library.
Related pages
- Andrew Gordon | 1980
- The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer (Mailer Critical Library, No. 1)
- The Naked and the Dead | Barbary Shore | The Deer Park | An American Dream | Why Are We in Vietnam? | The Armies of the Night