Clockwork Cuckoos - Affect and Charming Criminals in the Counterculture

Abstract

This thesis aims to provide an insight into the process which guides readers’ reception of countercultural literature in the context of Post-war Society. In particular, the piece wants to highlight the pivotal role of fictional subversive protagonists in the creation of polarised emotional reactions to their social activities, in accordance with affective theories and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “Abstract Machine”, operating inside a heteroglot social environment. Focusing on the historical and cultural context of the 1950s and 1960s – on the background of the Cold War and the prominent interest in modern psychiatry, – this thesis analyses instances of affective impact, coming from works of fiction, on different typologies of readers. Moreover, it highlights the significance of this plurality of responses as result of a movement of affect towards emotion, movement whose direction is established by the conscious process of elaboration of external inputs. By examining Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, this thesis also identifies linguistic devices and narrative techniques employed by the authors in their works to foreground elements related to those socio-political issues relevant to the context of Counterculture; linguistic devices and narrative techniques which allow for a more effective activation of the conscious elaboration of affect.