4. American individualism is sometimes portrayed (especially by libertarians) as an exclusively Lockean affair, but is has a richer emotional life than that, fertilized by the inheritance of Protestantism & refashioned by Emerson & Thoreau.
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5. It was Emerson & Thoreau that replenished the Whig & Calvinist heritage by making individualism about more than money-grubbing or spiritual preening: individualism was also local democracy and the ecstatic communion with nature.
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6. That Emersonian/Thoreauvian individualism has always been a big part of The New Yorker's DNA, thanks to the huge influence of EB White on the magazine but showing up in many writers (there are echos in Salinger & Updike). That's why the magazine is so susceptible to Franzen.
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7. That individualism has a lot to recommend to it (and has strong affinities with the, gasp, the bourgeois mimetic novel) but it also stunts Franzen's political imagination and limits his ability to even conceive of collective solutions to climate.
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8. In The Corrections, Franzen has a funny bit where a character sells his Fredric Jameson books in order to go on spending spree with his girlfriend: "Fred Jameson didn't have Julia’s artful tongue." But Jameson has a pertinent critique of Franzen's failure of imagination.
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9. Jameson: "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." That's exactly Frazen's condition. His current New Yorker piece ends with a fantasy that falls squarely in the genre of the cozy catastrophe, where apocalypse revives small town life.pic.twitter.com/3vyqEymU6v
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10. "Cozy catastrophe" is a term Brian Aldiss coined to describe John Wyndham novels: "The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off."
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11. We really don't have the luxury for fantasies of a cozy catastrophe, where global ecological collapse will return us to the comforts of small farm life and local democracy and Thoreauvian reveries over warblers. There's a world to save.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
You may or may not be right about Franzen’s cozy complacency, but can you please avoid incorrectly lumping Thoreau in? He spent his life fighting and writing against slavery and war. Not remotely similar to Franzen’s attitude as you describe it.
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Replying to @asheresque @HeerJeet
It’s true that Franzen claims Thoreau as an inspiration. That doesn’t mean that Thoreau, author of “On The Duty of Civil Disobedience,” is defined by Franzen. Thoreau urged mass action against injustice.
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It's true Thoreau is much better than Franzen but also true that Franzen derives from Thoreau (in however debased a form).
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Replying to @HeerJeet
I see the intellectual lineage and I do understand your point - but I don’t see anything in Franzen’s work that parallels the massively influential “Civil Disobedience”. (And am so sick of people beating up on the great HDT.)
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