The American Novel After Ideology, 1961-2000

Rezensionen / Stimmen

The American Novel After Ideology is essential reading for scholars seeking to interrogate 'ideology's operational elision' from literary studies after the end of WWII, a period first described by Daniel Bell as 'the end of ideology.' Rodrigues' perceptive study insists, contra such discourses of the end and of accomplished consensus, on historicizing specific post-war moments in which literary production occurs to reveal omissions, distortions, 'problems of inscription.' These arise at many levels, beginning with critically overlooked and dismissed novels, like J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey & Carlene Hatcher Polite's The Flagellants, which have not received much attention and have disappeared from literary history; uncanny resonances between the works considered; the jarring discontinuities that exist, in these novels, with respect to dominant modes of interpretation and an apparently 'finished' ideological system. Rodrigues' rich interpretive framework-exploratory and interdisciplinary-thereby inspires us to reconsider the place of ideology in literary production. * Fabienne Collignon, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Sheffield University, UK * Rodrigues combines insightful close reading, compelling historical evidence, and deft theoretical explication to demonstrate how post-WWII writers wrestled with sociopolitical and literary narratives in a supposedly post-ideological age. Like the texts she examines, Rodrigues interprets interpretation, offering an illuminating study of American cultural meaning-making, as well as a new model for literary interpretation. * Kristin L. Matthews, Professor of English, Brigham Young University, USA *