On liberal democracy and the temperaments of the twentieth-century essay

Thesis

This thesis challenges the conflation of the essay form with a brand of liberal scepticism that emerged during the cold war period. I contend that the paradoxical nature of the essay made it a productive literary form for negotiating the competing methodological logics of liberal democracy. Specifically, between the commitment to a set of stable, universal principles, and democratic pluralism as sustaining ongoing critique. I shed light on the essays of George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion, as each of them used the essay to wrestle with the challenge of thinking and writing in the paradoxical energies of post-war democratic liberalism. I argue that two essayistic temperaments emerged in the mid-twentieth century, each of which provided the means to reckon with these contradictory impetuses in distinct ways. In my coda I briefly sketch how Zadie Smith has inherited and renewed these temperaments for the twenty-first century. As each of these writers responded to different socio-political exigencies, including the utopian rationalism of the 1940s, progressive aversion to authority during the American civil rights movement of the 1950s, and the countercultural turn of the late 1960s, the essay has repeatedly emerged as the ideal literary form for negotiating the challenge of making critical judgements about the world. In their attempts to forge essayistic temperaments capable of handling the tension between the openness necessary for examination, and the resolve necessary for judgement, each of these writers came into productive contact with the competing methodological demands of democratic liberalism across the mid-twentieth, and into the twenty-first, century.

Authors: Young, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-zoyjnq988
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Joan Didion; essay; Lionel Trilling; George Orwell; James Baldwin; Zadie Smith; liberal democracy; Susan Sontag; Hannah Arendt
• Subjects: Politics and literature