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Document Type

Article

Abstract

This article explores the limitations of John Hersey's influential account of the effects of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan. This is done by foregrounding the consumerist iconography of New Yorker advertisements, which ran alongside "Hiroshima" in August 1946, as a symbol of the contradictions of post-war liberalism. Hersey’s journalistic ethic and aesthetic of "immediacy" runs up against a dominant discourse capable of framing even socially critical sentiment as but one more commodity.

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