| This course charts the development of the American political novel since the 1960's, exploring how this form has been taken up by major writers like Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Don Delillo. We will focus, in particular, on novels that explore the failed promise of welfare state liberalism after the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. We will ask questions such as the following: How have U.S. novelists imagined the institutions of the welfate state? What fictional alternatives do they present to the bureaucratism of those institutions? Do novelists who grew up during the New Deal Era (for instance, Ellison, Mailer, and Bellow) approach the welfare state differently than those who grew up after World War II? Why have post-1960's novelists had such a difficult time envisaging any connection between their own politics and that of the Democratic Party? Is there any connection between the anti-statism of the writers sympathetic to the New Left and those sympathetic to the neoconservative right? |
