Political Estrangement and the Novel

Abstract

The Political Novel: Re-Imagining Twentieth Century by Stuart A. Scheingold New York: Continuum, 2010. 262 pages Critics have long debated complex relationship between politics and literature, with positions ranging from New Criticism's idealized apolitical literary aesthetic to arguments, such as Fredric Jameson's, that fact all literature in last analysis (5) political. Stuart A. Scheingold situates himself between these two poles his impressive and highly readable interdisciplinary study The Political Novel: Re-Imagining Tiventieth Century. Arguing that political novel inextricably related to modernism, Scheingold proposes new species of political fiction: novel of political estrangement. He asserts that this genre emerges first ashes of World War I, though it does not fully develop until post-World War II era. In The Political Novel, Scheingold uses novel of political estrangement as fresh means by which to understand ideological conflicts of twentieth Specifically, Scheingold explores ways literary imagination has grappled with failures of the terrible twentieth century (1). Historians and social theorists--Scheingold among them--have long looked at ways faith was shaken by past century's [contamination] by total war, destabilization of democracy and emergence of totalitarian regimes. In The Political Novel, political scientist Scheingold shifts his method from empirical social sciences to literary criticism order to discover a counterpart, complement. perhaps corrective to these other forms of scholarly (2). Scheingold argues that novels of political estrangement constitute new genre that resonates with mournful legacy of twentieth century--that is, with futility of political struggle. [They] shift attention from political actors and institutions to general public--ordinary people whose agency has been appropriated by autocratic regimes, by bureaucratic institutions and by professionals with expertise to colonize consciousness. (2) By presenting politics and political actors as absent presence, such novels direct attention to consumers and casualties (19) of political. Scheingold uses novels of political estrangement as means to better understand twentieth century's legacy of catastrophe and disillusionment, and to refine our sense of what to come twenty-first. As Scheingold puts it, The Political Novel is interdisciplinary inquiry refracted through political, cultural, historical and literary prisms. [Ultimately], however, politics drives this research and literature deployed to tell political, not literary, story (3). Despite this thrust--literature used as vehicle for understanding politics--The Political Novel truly interdisciplinary, with illuminating readings of over two dozen important novels that will be germane to those interested literature, politics, history, and social theory. Scheingold grounds his readings with introductory discussion of what he deems the modern (3). He defines modernity as an that deployed by variety of disciplines to make sense out of relentless sea changes societies at close of nineteenth and beginning of twentieth century. Scheingold acknowledges that many disciplines using as intellectual construct have produced countless iterations of concept. Despite this range of definitions, Scheingold cites broad agreement among modernists that origins of modern project can be traced to culture of rationality associated with eighteenth-century Enlightenment (3) and that progress as human endeavor its animating ideal. Scheingold references Anthony Giddens order to name the nation-state system, world capitalist economy, world military order and division of labor (4) as dominant modern institutions operating alongside modernist cultural values such as secularism, materialism, individualism, rationalism, and separation of private and public spheres. …