No Exit: Contemporary American Literature and the State (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture)

By: Seth McKelvey

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Synopsis: America's authors and the unfulfilled desire to escape the state From hippie culture to neoliberalism to Black Lives Matter, anti-state sentiment and rhetoric persists through varying—and sometimes electorally opposed—forms in American politics and culture. Examining the work of some of the leading authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—including William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Richard Wright, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, Juliana Spahr, and Nathaniel Mackey—Seth McKelvey offers a new perspective on American literature&’s many conceptions of an escape from the political state. Through close readings of texts varied in their political orientations, historical concerns, literary genres, and aesthetic commitments, No Exit reveals a provocative overlap between literary and political representation, showing just how urgent yet difficult it has been for American literature to imagine leaving the state behind.