A Flight from the Real?: American Literature and Political Theory

In this essay, I pursue two related claims. One is that American literature is recurrently read by theorists as a form of flight from politics, a view they argue in various ways by deploying a distinction between the real and the fictive, and so also between forms of realism in contrast to genres aligned with the fantastical. My examples are Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of “poetry,” work in American studies that distinguishes “romance” from “the novel,” and a recent critique of “sixties literature,” inspired by the approach of Walter Benn Michaels and called “Do You Believe in Magic?” In each example, theorists speak as if they occupy the real, and merely report on it, so as to depict a literature engaged in fantasies or genres that abstract from social reality. By splitting the real and fictive, these critics would identify the organizing fantasies that devalue politics and disavow its actual ground. But each yields a flawed account of American politics, of the political, of literature.