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More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.

Friday, October 3, 2025

BOOK NEWS: Seeking true equality via literary moments of resistance

Democratic Anarchy: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in U.S. Literature

By Matthew Scully



Fordham UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781531507077

https://fordhampress.com/democratic-anarchy-hb-9781531507060.html


Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can “the people” be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality?

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form.

By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strate­gies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance—both aesthetic and political—inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antago­nizes the order of things.

Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière in particular, Democratic Anarchy offers a compelling theory of democracy and an incisive critique of consensus politics in the United States. Its sharp rhetorical readings of diverse examples of US literature draw out a vision of radical equality beyond the limits of representation. —Christian P. Haines, author of A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons

All readers of Scully. . . will find their certainties questioned, their convictions probed, and should relish seeing their favorite literary touchstones re-illuminated in the strobe light of political relevance and political impotence. —Anglia: Journal of English Philology


Matthew Scully is a lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of Lausanne. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of Modern Literature, Diacritics, African American Review, American Literature, Critical Inquiry, and Postmodern Culture.

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