Radical democracy and the American romance

Abstract

My thesis positions the contested category of the American Romance within Jacques Rancière s account of the relationship between literary and political modernity. I will suggest that for many American writers the evocation of romance offered a means of tuning their writing towards an abstract encounter with the political as it is defined in the philosophy of Jacques Rancière.

The political, for Rancière, is constituted by a moment in which the boundaries and internal demarcations of the sensible world are reconfigured. This could be a moment when a subject thought to be incapable of deliberative utterance, but only of the noise of complaint, assumes the right to speak on behalf of the collective, or when the so called natural behavior of a specific class of persons becomes denaturized . Rancière defines politics as the paradoxical appearance of the part that has no part , thus framing the moment of politics as an unsettling of reality, as some have put it, a wringing of ontology. In aligning the uncanniness of Rancière s political ontology with the anachronisms of the modern romance and the supernatural devices of the Gothic genre, I am working somewhat against the grain of his own literary categories. Rancière positions the realist novel as the primary form of an aesthetic modernity where, for the first time, the literary and the aesthetic are seen as autonomous practices capable of intervening in the configuration of the community, thus demonstrating their alignment with the practice of politics as such. He aligns older forms like the romance with what he calls the representative rather than the aesthetic regime. However, I want to suggest that hybrid forms like the modern romance or the gothic novel, can often derive their energy from the deregulation of hieratic relations of form and content, with the disincorporation of genre acting as a process internal to the genre. This is especially apparent in Pierre, and to a lesser extent, in Wieland, where a certain generic instability is put at the center of the representation of the democratic national space.