User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding

of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic

tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans

were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream

media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers

were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from

sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,

their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and

one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.

But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience

as a fellow marcher,we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}

===Citations===

@@ Line 35: / Line 35: @@
 novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding
 of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.
+The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic
+tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans
+were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America."{{sfn|MacFarlane|2007|p=133}} ''Armies'' was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream
+media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers
+were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from
+sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence,
+their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=44}} Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and
+one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture.
+But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience
+as a fellow marcher,we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and {{pg|484|485}}
 ===Citations===