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.
-
Show this thread
-
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.
4 replies 2 retweets 60 likesShow this thread -
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.
2 replies 4 retweets 58 likesShow this thread -
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.
4 replies 5 retweets 80 likesShow this thread -
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.
2 replies 4 retweets 50 likesShow this thread -
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
10 replies 36 retweets 169 likesShow this thread -
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."
6 replies 17 retweets 90 likesShow this thread -
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.
10 replies 11 retweets 114 likesShow this thread -
12. I have some more thoughts here on where Jonathan Franzen is coming from and why he's wrong. https://www.thenation.com/article/climate-change-jonathan-franzen/ …
13 replies 20 retweets 92 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @HeerJeet
Stick to why he's wrong. Where he's coming from is ad hominem irrelevance.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
"where he's coming from" means in this context the intellectual tradition that formed him.
-
-
Replying to @HeerJeet
Either he's right about the chances of staying below tipping point or he isn't. That question is infinitely more important than his intellectual tradition.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @BeeseJoe
When smart people get something wrong, it's worth trying to figure out the path that led them astray. That's one reason we have the discipline of intellectual history.
1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes - Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.