ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 examines the relationship between narratives of the American dream and dystopia. Taking a cue from Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, I argue for a “dystopian design” in American literature, a reflexive tradition that pits the free subject against narratives of American capitalism. Nathanael West’s A Cool Million and David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross explore the death of the American dream by rereading America’s formative mythologies through a dystopian lens. Like the texts in the earlier chapters, these works deform their narrative antecedents, shrinking agency while concomitantly expanding and rigidifying setting.
