American Novel After Ideology 1961-2000

Claims of ideology's end are on the one hand performative denials of ideology's inability to end; while on the other hand paradoxically they also reiterate an idea that 'ending' is simply what all ideologies eventually do. Situating her work around the intersecting publications of Daniel Bell's <i>The End of Ideology</i> (1960) and J.D. Salinger's <i>Franny and Zooey</i>(1961) Laurie Rodrigues argues that American novels express this paradox through nuanced applications of non-realist strategies distorting realism in manners similar to ideology's distortions of reality history and belief. <br/><br/>Reflecting the astonishing cultural variety of this period <i>The American Novel After Ideology 1961 - 2000</i> examines <i>Franny and Zooey </i> Carlene Hatcher Polite's <i>The Flagellants</i>(1967) Leslie Marmon Silko's <i>Almanac of the Dead</i> (1991) and Philip Roth's <i>The Human Stain</i> (2001) alongside the various discussions around ideology with which they intersect. Each novel's plotless narratives dissolving subjectivities and cultural codes organize the texts' peculiar relations to the post-ideological age suggesting an aesthetic return of the repressed.