A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government

Sean McCann; Sean McCann

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A Pinnacle of Feeling

American Literature and Presidential Government

Sean McCann and Sean McCann

Language: English

Published/Copyright: 2008

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About this book

There is no more powerful symbol in American political life than the presidency, and the image of presidential power has had no less profound an impact on American fiction. A Pinnacle of Feeling is the first book to examine twentieth-century literature's deep fascination with the modern presidency and with the ideas about the relationship between state power and democracy that underwrote the rise of presidential authority.

Sean McCann challenges prevailing critical interpretations through revelatory new readings of major writers, including Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Don Delillo, and Philip Roth. He argues that these writers not only represented or satirized presidents, but echoed political thinkers who cast the chief executive as the agent of the sovereign will of the American people. They viewed the president as ideally a national redeemer, and they took that ideal as a model and rival for their own work.

A Pinnacle of Feeling illuminates the fundamental concern with democratic sovereignty that informs the most innovative literary works of the twentieth century, and shows how these works helped redefine and elevate the role of executive power in American culture.

Author / Editor information

Sean McCann is professor of English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism.

Reviews

"It is a tribute to McCann's superb book--one of the best I have read in the past five years--that his sharp description of the Republican project is a mere side-light, not central to his concerns or his thesis. McCann's scholarship, his knowledge of American history and the debates throughout that history about presidential power, his powers of exact description, and his probing analysis of the fundamental tensions in American democracy combine to make [other's] perfectly honorable books look rather pedestrian."---John McGowan, American Literary History --- "[T]his book stands as an inventive, somewhat original brand of literary criticism."---B. Wallenstein, Choice --- "McCann identifies how ambitions for the executive branch of the US government informed the 20th-century novel. . . . Few presidents appear as literary protagonists in their own right. Instead, their position serves as an ethical benchmark--whether as an authoritarian father figure, a career goal or even the target of an assassination attempt. If this symbolic use of public office threatens to rework the presidency as a chimerical, ghostly presence in the American novel, McCann carefully rebuilds these vague impressions to illustrate how authors reimagined the issue of popular sovereignty. His key argument gains momentum by describing how the ongoing debates over the boundaries of presidential government found close literary parallels. The arguments in political science monographs and middlebrow, social forecasting non-fiction are shown as the logical counterpart to imaginative representations of government institutions."---Graham Barnfield, Times Higher Education

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Frontmatter
i

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CONTENTS
vii

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Preface
ix
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Introduction. The Executive Disease: Presidential Power and Literary Imagination
1
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Chapter One. Masters of Their Constitution: Gertrude Stein and the Promise of Progressive Leadership
33
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Chapter Two. Governable Beasts: Hurston, Roth, and the New Deal
67
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Chapter Three. The Myth of the Public Interest: Pluralism and Presidentialism in the Fifties
100
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Chapter Four. Come Home, America: Vietnam And The End Of The Progressive Presidency
139
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Epilogue. Philip Roth And The Waning And Waxing Of Political Time
178
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Notes
197
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Index
243

Publishing information

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

eBook published on:

October 6, 2008

eBook ISBN:

9781400828906

Edition:

Course Book

Pages and Images/Illustrations in book

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400828906

eBook ISBN: 9781400828906

Keywords for this book

Writing; Politics; Ideology; Institution; Rhetoric; Narrative; The Making of Americans; Sovereignty; The Public Interest; Woodrow Wilson; Popular sovereignty; Intellectual; National identity; Individualism; Politician; Racism; Imperialism; Call It Sleep; Vladimir Nabokov; Enthusiasm; Native Son; Progressivism; Citizenship; Eloquence; African Americans; Determination; Suggestion; Literature; Progressive Era; Sensibility; Great Society; Great power; Awareness; Salinger; Grandiosity; Sophistication; Personhood; Sentimentality; Self-determination; Patriotism; Career; Activism; Ambivalence; Westphalian sovereignty; Deference; Symbolic power; Political philosophy; Peroration; Venality; Gertrude Stein; Mr.; Multitude; Greatness; Memoir; Reactionary; Disenchantment; Rugged individualism; Containment; Herod the Great; Loyalty; Demagogue; Nationalism; Narration; Democracy; The Various; Pity; Reformism; Malcolm Cowley; Ayn Rand; The Erotic

Audience(s) for this book

For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research

A Pinnacle of Feeling

Overview

About this book

Author / Editor information

Reviews

Topics

Table of contents

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction. The Executive Disease: Presidential Power and Literary Imagination

Chapter One. Masters of Their Constitution: Gertrude Stein and the Promise of Progressive Leadership

Chapter Two. Governable Beasts: Hurston, Roth, and the New Deal

Chapter Three. The Myth of the Public Interest: Pluralism and Presidentialism in the Fifties

Chapter Four. Come Home, America: Vietnam And The End Of The Progressive Presidency

Epilogue. Philip Roth And The Waning And Waxing Of Political Time

Notes

Index

Bibliographic data