The Paranoid Chronotope

Book excerpt: Why does it seem like our everyday life is shadowed by something menacing? This book identifies and illuminates paranoia as a significant feature of contemporary U.S. society and culture. Centering on what it identifies as three key dimensions - power, truth, and identity - in three different contexts - society, literature, and critique - the book explores and explains the increasing influence of paranoid thinking in U.S. society during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first, a period which has seen the rise of control systems and neoliberal ascendency. Inquiring about the predominance of white, male, American subjects in paranoid culture, Frida Beckman recognizes an antagonistic maintenance and fortification of a conception of the autonomous individual that perceives itself as under threat. Identifying such paranoia as emerging from an increasingly disjunctive relation between this conception of the subject and the changing nature of the public sphere, she develops the concept of the paranoid chronotope as a tool for theoretical analysis of social, literary, and critical practices today. Investigating 21st century paranoid fictions, phenomena, and debates such as New Sincerity novels, conspiracist online culture, and postcritique, Beckman shows how the paranoid chronotope constitutes a recurring feature of modern consciousness.