• 20th -21st century United States popular culture

 
• the drug war in political discourse and popular culture

 
• technology and post-humanism

 
• the politics of history in postmodern narrative

 
• conspiracy as a cultural code

 
• gangsters and gansta rap

 
• the visionary as mad person

 

Paranoia, Politics and the Popular Imagination: Conspiracy Narratives in Contemporary American Literature

The study examines conspiracy as a narrative form that has shaped the way twentieth-century America articulates and understands its history and, more specifically, the way conspiracy narratives inform a cultural conception of sociopolitical authority. By tracing the evolution of conspiracy narratives in historical, literary, and popular culture texts, the study reads a transformation within a national identity, from a public besieged with internal enemies to one that indicts its government as the internal enemy. This narrative discourse forms a dialectic whose ideological stakes define the agency of historical and political authority in America.