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Are Three Generations of Radicals Enough? Self-Critique in the Novels of Tess Slesinger, Mary McCarthy and Marge Piercy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Philip Abbott
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Extract

Three novels by Tess Slesinger, Mary McCarthy and Marge Piercy respectively can inform us about American radical movements and perhaps radicalism in general. Each work is a radical self-critique written by political participants who assess their generation's radical experiment and its failure. I argue that there are two sets of arguments common to each critique, one related to the failure of radical imagination and one feminist, and that there is a “submerged” third critique that can be drawn from each narrative. It is from the later submerged critique that we can learn the most about the successive failures of American radicalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , Fall 1991 , pp. 602 - 626
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1991

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References

1. For autobiographical and biographical analyses, see: for Slesinger, , Biagi, Shirley, “Forgive Me for Dying,” Antioch Review 35 (Spring-Summer 1977): 224–36Google Scholar; Janet Sharistanian “Afterward,” Slesinger, , The Unpossessed (New York: Feminist Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Wald, Alan, “The Menorah Group Moves Left,” Jewish Social Studies 38 (Summer-Fall 1976): 289–320Google Scholar; for McCarthy, McCarthy, , On the Contrary (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1962)Google Scholar; Gelderman, Carol, Mary McCarthy: A Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988)Google Scholar; for Piercy, , Betsky, Celia “A Talk with Marge Piercy,” New York Times Book Review, 24 02 1980, pp. 36–38Google Scholar; Piercy, , Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Gitlin, Todd, The Sixties (New York: Bantam, 1987), pp. 371–73.Google Scholar

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5. Ibid., pp. 411–12.

6. While loosely related to recent literary theorization which seeks to discover submerged analyses in texts, the following textual analysis is primarily a “reconstructive” effort in that it seeks to append narratives to those expressly stated.

7. Slesinger, , The Unpossessed, pp. 33–34.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., p. 31.

9. Ibid., p. 29.

10. Ibid., p. 31.

11. Ibid., pp. 326–30.

12. Ibid., pp. 40–41.

13. Ibid., p. 53.

14. Ibid., p. 61.

15. Ibid., p. 231.

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17. Ibid., p. 89.

18. Ibid., pp. 19, 21–22.

19. Ibid., p.88.

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21. Ibid., pp. 32–33.

22. Ibid., p. 109.

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26. Ibid., p. 310–11.

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47. For a helpful review of problems in recent social movement theory, see Boggs, Carl, Social Movements and Political Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), chap. 1.Google Scholar

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