A Guide to the Archive: Political Theory and American Literature (pre-proofs) (original) (raw)
A Flight from the Real?: American Literature and Political Theory
New Literary History, 2014
new literary history 550 fiction and fantasy, end up serving what Rancière calls the police. 2 And on the other hand, if the paradox of politics is that we project (in varying ways) what does not exist yet as a referent-a future, say, or those Rancière calls "a part with no part," or "the people"-then we need to credit fantasy, as it were before a referent. To conceive the political truly is to reject the limits of realist aesthetics and its mimetic illusion. At issue is not the real as such distorted by the fictive or fantastical as such, but forms of fiction or fantasy and what they make visible and what they occlude; at issue in politics, therefore, is judging not (only) the referentiality of fiction or narrative, but their generativity, and so also their implications if enacted. Faced with stunning forms of denial, of inequality, empire, or climate change, it is tempting to tell people to "face reality." The dangers in fantasy and fiction are manifest in so many ways that anxiety about delusion, illusion, self-deception, and disavowal is certainly justified. But there is no politics, and surely no radical politics, without "imagined community," collective identifications, visions of possibility. If politics depends on fantasy in these senses, then the task is not replacing the fictive with the real, but making political judgments about better and worse magic, about the worlds and subjects that different fictions (of the real) occlude or make visible, make impossible or available. 3 My second claim, therefore, is that some works of American literature, since Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" or Melville's Moby Dick, abjure a realistic aesthetic precisely to show, we might say enact, the central genres and fantasies constituting (American) political life, and to dramatize their staggering human cost. Great literary art has thus dramatized not only how American politics is founded on disavowals-of social bonds, history, or of what blackness signifies-but also how such disavowal is one side of "monomaniacal" investment in particular fictions, of personal and political sovereignty, of national unity, progress, or innocence. (Scholars thus argue that certain genres govern American political language, such as jeremiad, romance, and melodrama, as each joins what Leo Marx called the pastoral to what Hofstadter called the paranoid.) 4 Because American politics bespeaks the conventions and expectations of certain genres, I will argue, literary art does not so much repeat as rework them. Indeed, when political rhetoric does not conform to the conventions of realism, but takes on forms of what I call political romance, genres of fabulation-like the ghost story, allegory, tragedy, or farce-are in fact needed to dramatize the investments, disavowals, and specters constitutive of American political life. By fictional representation of the genres of national fantasy, literary artists make visible what is, as a condition
Exploring the political impact of literature and literary studies in American government
2017
This thesis explores the role of literature and practices of literary study in American government. Specifically, it looks at how the President’s Council on Bioethics (PCBE) and the Supreme Court have deliberately embraced the humanities to fulfill their respective responsibilities. I begin by examining the interpretive practices these groups employ, then turn to lists of recommended reading published by the PCBE and Justice Anthony Kennedy. I investigate how their endorsements of texts such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, My Antonia, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and To Kill a Mockingbird promote certain constructions of traditional American values that are central to the choices these government organizations make. To close, I draw from the work of Martha Nussbaum to show how the lessons the PCBE and Justice Kennedy take from this fiction translate into executive orders, legislation, and legal opinions that shape public policy in America.
Politics, 1995
What are the possibilities of connection between politics and literature? How have those possibilities been developed? Why should students of politics turn to literature as a source of political understanding? Connections have traditionally been made in terms of literature as illustration or example for politics or as a form of moral education. Other possibilities are a ‘political sociology of literature’ or literature as a primary source for political studies. Work in the United States suggests further extensions. The case for ‘politics and literature’ is also strengthened by recent developments in political theory such as the interest in ‘identity’ or ‘narrative’.
Political Narrative Fiction and the Responsibility of the Author
Art in general and fiction in particular have had close affinities with politics throughout history. When there is a close tie between a narrative fiction and political issues then critics may deem it as "committed fiction". Political fiction is at the crossroads of political science and the art of fiction. And more often than not, novelists are involved with politics but not all of them are dubbed as or even consider themselves to be political novelists. In this article I attempt to investigate political fiction as a distinct genre produced (un)consciously by a range of (politically committed) novelists and critics. The authors discussed in this paper demonstrate dissimilar perspectives on freedom and democracy. Also, regarding political fiction and the responsibility of author, we will see how divergent is the attitudes of critics such as
Novels and Narratives: The Pursuit of Forms and Perceptive Policymaking
What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, 2021
This chapter considers how we might think about policy interventions in the twenty-first century and, in particular, how we can eschew the methodological strait jacket recommended by Political Science while bringing the benefits of the broader research methods of the arts and humanities more common in Area Studies. In considering the current situation in Political Science, the use of the term science indicates a preference for the methods of the natural sciences in attempting to shed light upon people, polities, policy and the pursuit of politics. As an academic who previously worked in party politics (as a senior party administrator), using positivist approaches as the pre-eminent means to understand the way things are in the minority world proved startlingly insufficient. This chapter addresses these concerns and considers three issues. Firstly, it contemplates the common modus operandi in Political Science over recent decades. Secondly, it engages with recent conversations in the field of literary theory (and, in particular, the work of