Camelot’s Killers
Gordon Dickson’s Rhetorical Cleansing of America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895799 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tim Blackmore (0000-0002-9411-0440, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 167-200 |
| Publication date | 2001-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-s031-03-05 |
| OpenAlex | W2002987803 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King – Else, wherefore born... Tennyson, Idylls of the King Writing Around the TableThe idea of Camelot was a lance stuck in the side of American culture – the eruption that followed spilled some of the best and the brightest blood in Southeast Asia and Africa. In the science fiction community, Gordon Dickson’s well-liked Childe Cycle1 published between 1960 and 1994, made a fictional Camelot that paralleled Kennedy’s New Frontier. In this paper, I argue that the series functions to make war bloodless and palatable, to mirror the rhetorical postures of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and its political aftermath. A line can be drawn from Kennedy’s rhetoric to the creation of the Peace Corps, the space race, and the deepening involvement in Vietnam. This paper understands Kennedy’s rhetoric to be a step in the direction of American foreign policy that began in Vietnam and extended to other global conflicts. However, Dickson’s writing reflects the early heroic part of the mission: the part we most typically associate with Kennedy’s New Frontier
Archaeology · Art · Character (mathematics · Frontier · Literature · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Theology · History · Law · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Media Studies and Communication · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |