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| | "Why Americans can't write political fiction." by Christopher Lehmann |
 | | In 1984, the political novel's most famous modern exemplar, Orwell reckoned with the most decisive forces loose in the modern world: not merely the rise of totalitarian political regimes, but also the triumph of a depersonalized mass culture, the humorless bureaucratized workplace, and the abolition of historical memory. |
 | | With the most deadly political failure fresh in the nation's memory, Whitman, in 1871, issued his famous call for a distinctive, politically minded American literature in his essay “Democratic Vistas.” A new national literature, Whitman argued, was the only force adequate to heal a newly sutured American nation. |
 | | As political animals, they're accustomed to honoring few clear distinctions between their messy, conflicted, adulterous, and boozy lives and their obligations to the public weal, and so they are not in the business of sacrificing one for the sake of the other. |
| www.washingtonmonthly.com /features/2005/0510.lehmann.html (4164 words) |
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