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Democratic anarchy : aesthetics and political resistance in U.S. literature / Matthew Scully

Author
Scully, Matthew
Published
New York : Fordham University Press, 2024.
Copyright Date
©2024
Edition
First edition.
Physical Description
269 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

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Contents
Introduction : Democracy’s Death Drive -- Part I : Democratic Aesthetics. The Genres of Democracy : Romance, Sentiment, and the Slave Narrative -- Parataxis and Metalepsis, or Figures of Democratic Equality -- Part II : Aestheticidal Resistance. A Poetics of Dissensus : Migrant, Citizen, and the Catachresis of Identity -- Against Representation, or Utopia After All -- Coda : Disavowal and Figural Annihilation.
Summary
"At its core, Democratic Anarchy: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in US Literature grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Scully asks, how can "the people" be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality? Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors-including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman-Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form. By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strategies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance-both aesthetic and political-inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antagonizes the order of things. The breadth of the book's theoretical and literary engagements will make it of interest not only to scholars of American literary studies but to anyone invested in contemporary literary and theoretical debates"--
Subject(s)
ISBN
1531507077
9781531507077 paperback
1531507069
9781531507060 hardcover
9781531507084
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Endowment Note
Paterno Libraries Endowment
View MARC record | catkey: 45082785