Intimate Strangers - Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, Said in American Political Discourse

Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said each steered major intellectual and political schools of thought in American political discourse after World War II, yet none of them was American, which proved crucial to their ways of arguing and reasoning both in and out of the American context. In an effort to convince their audiences they were American enough, these thinkers deployed deft rhetorical strategies that made their cosmopolitanism feel acceptable, inspiring radical new approaches to longstanding problems in American politics. Speaking like natives, they also exploited their foreignness to entice listeners to embrace alternative modes of thought.

List of contents

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Stranger Persona2. Hannah Arendt: The Thinker and the American Republic3. Herbert Marcuse's German Revolution in America4. Cold War Prophesies: Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mythological America5. Edward Said and the Clash of IdentitiesConclusionNotesIndex

About the author

Andreea Deciu Ritivoi is professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on immigration, exile, political discourse, argumentation theory, and intellectual history. She is the author of Yesterday's Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity and Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory.

Summary

Intimate Strangers restores the legacy of four critics who used their foreignness to challenge America’s political complacency.

Report

"Ritivoi lends her lucid, careful, well balanced analysis to a topic to which our years of heightened suspicion concede heightened relevance. She offers a wealth of material on the American, German, Russian and Palestinian historical and cultural contexts in a mix organized according to the variety of Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Saids stranger personae. I would have titled this book Hannah and Her Others, had I written it. But I have not." - Clin-Andrei Mihilescu, University of Western Ontario

Product details

• Authors: Andreea Ritivoi, Andreea (Associate Professor of English Ritivoi, Andreea D. Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Ritivoi Andreea Deciu
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 07.10.2014
• EAN: 9780231168687
• ISBN: 978-0-231-16868-7
• No. of pages: 320
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Philosophy > General, dictionaries; Social sciences, law, business > Political science; PHILOSOPHY / Political, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Civics & Citizenship, POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory, Philosophy, HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, social and political philosophy, United States of America, USA, History of the Americas, Political science and theory, 20th Century history; philosophy