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{{Byline|last=Mosser|first=Jason|url=|abstract=|note=}} | {{Byline|last=Mosser|first=Jason|url=|abstract=|note=}} | ||
BOTH NORMAN MAILER’S ''ST. GEORGE AND THE GODFATHER'' (1972) and Hunter S. | |||
Thompson’s ''Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, ’72'' (1973) deal with | |||
the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential race. As a way of situating ''St. George'' | |||
and ''Campaign Trail'' in their aesthetic, cultural, and historical contexts, I want | |||
to appropriate Kenneth Burke’s history-as-drama metaphor. To Burke, the | |||
terms dramatic and dialectic are closely related, for history, as he explains in | |||
''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', “is a ‘dramatic’ process, involving dialectical oppositions” (109). In 1972, rival political interests, Democrats and Republicans, as well as their presidential nominees, Richard Nixon and George | |||
McGovern assumed that the roles of antagonists and protagonists engaged | |||
in an ideological conflict between the dominant, pro-war establishment culture and an emergent, anti-war counterculture. Burke argues that “human | |||
affairs being dramatic, the discussion of human affairs [as in campaign journalism] becomes dramatic criticism,” a rhetorical act (''Philosophy 116''). Sometimes, however, what promises at first to be a dramatically charged event, | |||
like a political campaign, can fail to live up to the participants’ expectations, | |||
and such was the case with the major parties’ conventions in 1972. As literary journalists, then, each the central character and shaping the consciousness | |||
of his own narrative, Mailer and Thompson adopted their own characteristic strategies to meet the challenge of creating compelling narratives in the | |||
relative absence of real-life drama. | |||
Works Cited | Works Cited | ||