This essay argues that Jonathan Lethem’s 2009 novel Chronic City is the product of 1) the author’s anti-Bloomian relationship to literary influence, as seen in his 2007 essay “Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” (and elsewhere) and as worked out in his use of genre and the modes of realism and the fantastic, and 2) anxieties about the future characteristic of the author’s time. The result is an approach to representation the essay calls “domestic surrealism” and demonstrates this at work in the novel’s presentation of an unreal-feeling, spectacular New York City. At stake in Chronic City, the essay argues, is the question of whether the city’s/the world’s condition is chronic or terminal or if a time can be imagined that might be different from the current “wartime” and the dark future toward which we seem to be inevitably headed and, if it can be imagined, whether it is possible.
Life During Wartime: Domestic Surrealism in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City
Samuel Cohen teaches English at the University of Missouri. He is author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (2009), coeditor of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012) with Lee Konstantinou and The Clash Takes on the World: Transnational Perspectives on the Only Band That Matters (2017) with James Peacock, series editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture, and author of the textbooks 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology (2022) and Literature: The Human Experience (2018). He is working on a monograph on the history of university presses in the United States and an edited collection on book bans.
Samuel Cohen; Life During Wartime: Domestic Surrealism in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2024; 70 (4): 399–418. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-11534732
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