What Can Happen Here?: Philip Roth, Sinclair Lewis, and the Lessons of Fascism in the American Liberal Imagination
2011; Purdue University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/prs.2011.a430868
ISSN1940-5278
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoThis essay reads Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004) alongside Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here (1935) in order to show the central role of liberals and the left in building a politically-conscious antifascism in US culture. Both novels enter an almost century-long current of "dissonant antifascism," a discourse that uses fascism as a frame for reading the political right and the social fields out of which it emerges, at home and abroad. Read against Lewis's 1935 novel, The Plot Against America also shows how the left-liberal understanding of fascism has shifted as a result of the Holocaust and the social movements of the 1960s. A central part of this shift has been, perhaps surprisingly, the ability of Jewish writers to use fascism as a way of addressing specifically Jewish concerns. But despite how Roth is (perhaps unconsciously) informed by the institutional legacies of the late 1960s, lost in his novel are some of radical politics of cross-ethnic solidarity that animated the radical currents of both 1930s antifascism and the "new social movements" thirty years later.
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