American Literature in the Era of Trumpism

This edited collection offers an exploration of American literature in the age of Trumpism-understood as an ongoing sociopolitical and affective reality-by bringing together analyses of some of the ways in which American writers have responded to the derealization of political culture in the United States and the experience of a 'new' American reality after 2016. The volume's premise is that the disruptions and dislocations that were so exacerbated by the political ascendancy of Trump and his spectacle-laden presidency have unsettled core assumptions about American reality and the possibilities of representation. The blurring of the relationship between fact and fiction, bolstered by the discourses of 'fake news' and 'alternative facts,' has not only drawn attention to the shattering of any notion of 'shared' reality, but has also forced a reexamination of the purpose and value of literature, especially when considering its troubled relation to the representation of 'America.' The authors in this collection respond to the invitation to reassess the workings of fiction and critique in an age of Trumpism by considering some of the most recent literary responses to the (new) American realit(ies)-including works by Colson Whitehead, Ben Winters, Claudia Rankine, Gary Shteyngart, Jennifer Egan, and Steve Erickson, to name but a few-, some of which were composed in the run-up to the 2016 election but were able to accurately and incisively imagine the world to come.

Auteur

Dolores Resano is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin and Visiting Scholar in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Her current research project, funded by the European Commission, is focused on contemporary American and European literary fiction from a transatlantic perspective, with a special interest in the intersections of literature, politics, and theories of negative affect. Dr. Resano holds a PhD in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities from the Universitat de Barcelona, with a dissertation on post-9/11 fiction, satire, and public discourse.

Contenu

Introduction (Dolores Resano, University College Dublin) Section One: Thinking about FictionChapter 1: Empathy and Fiction in the Trump Era (Robert Anthony Siegel, University of North Carolina Wilmington) Chapter 2: Intersections of Literature, Politics and Narrative in a Fake News World: Huck Finn, Alice in Wonderland and Hannah Arendt's Conception of the "New" in Narrative (Karen Armstrong, York University) Chapter 3: "The office could be any office" - Moral Responsibility, Poststructuralism and the New Sincerity in American Literature and Right-Wing Politics (Dominik Steinhilber, University of Mannheim)Chapter 4: Writing the Resistance: Claudia Rankine's Exploration of Whiteness in The White Card (Angela Mullis, Rutgers University) Section Two: Alternative Histories of AmericaChapter 5: Alternative Histories, Alternative Homes, Alternative Nations: Contemporary Literature and Genre in the Age of Trump (Martha Jane Nadell, Brooklyn College, CUNY)Chapter 6: The Day the Music Died: The Invisible Republic in Steve Erickson's Shadowbahn (Liam Kennedy, University College Dublin)Chapter 7: "The Direction of the Bizarre": Reimagining History in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (Sonia Weiner, University of Tel Aviv)Chapter 8: Underground Airlines, Entropy, and Dehumanization (Karen Hellekson, Independent Scholar) Section Three: Subversive Humor as ContestationChapter 9: How Do We Laugh about This? Literary Satire in Trump Times (Teresa Botelho, Nova University of Lisbon) Chapter 10: Writing as Antidote: Muslim Writers Resist in Don't Panic, I'm Islamic and Banthology (Maria Mothes, University of Koblenz-Landau)Chapter 11: "I'd get so constipated if I were you": Otessa Moshfegh's Intimate Disgust (Tim Groenland, University College Cork)