Negative Liberties

[Dave Monroe]

Anyone familiar with ...

Patell, Cyrus R.K.  Negative Liberties:
   Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal
   Ideology.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001.

"Since the nineteenth century, ideas centered on the
individual, on Emersonian self-reliance, on the right
of the individual to the pursuit of happiness have had
a tremendous presence in the United States—and even
more so since the Reagan era. But has this presence
been for the good of all? In Negative Liberties Cyrus
R. K. Patell revises important ideas in the debate
over individualism and the political theory of
liberalism. He does so by bringing two new voices into
the current discussion—Toni Morrison and Thomas
Pynchon—to examine the different ways in which their
writings embody, engage, and critique the official
narratives generated by U.S. liberal ideology. 

"Patell shows that Pynchon and Morrison reveal the
official narrative of U.S. individualism as
encompassing a complex structure of contradiction held
in abeyance. The official narratives imagine that the
goals of the individual are not at odds with the goals
of the family or society and actually obscure the
existence of an unholy truce between individual
liberty and forms of oppression. By bringing these two
fiction writers into a discourse that has been
dominated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Isaiah Berlin, John
Rawls, George Kateb, Robert Bellah, and Michael
Sandel, Patell unmasks the ways in which U.S. culture
has not fully shed oppressive patterns of reasoning
that were dominant in the slaveholding culture from
which U.S. individualism emerged."

http://www.dukeupress.edu/cgibin/forwardsql/search.cgi?template0=nomatch.htm&template2=books/book_detail_page.htm&user_id=17025&Bmain.Btitle_option=1&Bmain.Btitle_=&Bmain.Btitle_option=1&Bmain.Btitle=Negative+Liberties&Bmain.Subtitle_option=1&Bmain.Subtitle_=&Bmain.Subtitle_option=1&Bmain.Subtitle=%3A+Morrison%2C+Pynchon%2C+and+the+Problem+of+Liberal+Ideology%3CBR%3E%3CBR%3E&distinct=Bmain.subject_BIP1&Bmain.subject_BIP1=&distinct=Bmain.subject_BIP2&Bmain.subject_BIP2=&distinct=Bmain.subject_BIP3&Bmain.subject_BIP3=

Seriously, that's the URL.  Sorry ...


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