Overview

Claims of ideology’s end are, on the one hand, performative denials of ideology’s inability to end; while, on the other hand, paradoxically, they also reiterate an idea that ‘ending’ is simply what all ideologies eventually do. Situating her work around the intersecting publications of Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology (1960) and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (1961), Laurie Rodrigues argues that American novels express this paradox through nuanced applications of non-realist strategies, distorting realism in manners similar to ideology’s distortions of reality, history, and belief. Reflecting the astonishing cultural variety of this period, The American Novel After Ideology, 1961 - 2000 examines Franny and Zooey, Carlene Hatcher Polite’s The Flagellants (1967), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2001) alongside the various discussions around ideology with which they intersect. Each novel’s plotless narratives, dissolving subjectivities, and cultural codes organize the texts’ peculiar relations to the post-ideological age, suggesting an aesthetic return of the repressed.

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9781501371417

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The American Novel After Ideology is essential reading for scholars seeking to interrogate 'ideology's operational elision' from literary studies after the end of WWII, a period first described by Daniel Bell as 'the end of ideology.' Rodrigues' perceptive study insists, contra such discourses of the end and of accomplished consensus, on historicizing specific post-war moments in which literary production occurs to reveal omissions, distortions, 'problems of inscription.' These arise at many levels, beginning with critically overlooked and dismissed novels, like J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey & Carlene Hatcher Polite's The Flagellants, which have not received much attention and have disappeared from literary history; uncanny resonances between the works considered; the jarring discontinuities that exist, in these novels, with respect to dominant modes of interpretation and an apparently 'finished' ideological system. Rodrigues' rich interpretive framework-exploratory and interdisciplinary-thereby inspires us to reconsider the place of ideology in literary production. * Fabienne Collignon, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Sheffield University, UK * Rodrigues combines insightful close reading, compelling historical evidence, and deft theoretical explication to demonstrate how post-WWII writers wrestled with sociopolitical and literary narratives in a supposedly post-ideological age. Like the texts she examines, Rodrigues interprets interpretation, offering an illuminating study of American cultural meaning-making, as well as a new model for literary interpretation. * Kristin L. Matthews, Professor of English, Brigham Young University, USA *

Author Information

Laurie A. Rodrigues holds a PhD from the University of Rhode Island. Her research and teaching is focused in 20th- and 21st-century Multiethnic American literatures, cultures, and critical theory.

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