No Exit: Contemporary American Literature and the State

America’s authors and the unfulfilled desire to escape the state

From hippie culture to neoliberalism to Black Lives Matter, anti-state sentiment and rhetoric persists through varying--and sometimes electorally opposed--forms in American politics and culture.

Examining the work of some of the leading authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries--including William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Richard Wright, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, Juliana Spahr, and Nathaniel Mackey--Seth McKelvey offers a new perspective on American literature’s many conceptions of an escape from the political state. Through close readings of texts varied in their political orientations, historical concerns, literary genres, and aesthetic commitments, No Exit reveals a provocative overlap between literary and political representation, showing just how urgent yet difficult it has been for American literature to imagine leaving the state behind.

Seth McKelvey is lecturer in English at Clemson University.