Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There’s a plausible argument that American culture is in a state of arrested development, ever bending back to a kind of national adolescence born of a persistent self-image of fledgling prodigy. Leslie Fiedler made the case as to literature at mid-century with Love and Death in the American Novel, insisting on the sober maturity of European letters in light of imperial decline and epochal devastation against the exceptionalist puerility of American fiction. Becca Rothfeld deftly rehabilitates and contextualizes this point of view in a recent New Yorker piece, landing it on a hortatory if plangent note: “Perhaps now that we are standing amid the ruins of the East Wing and the wreckage of the post-war liberal order – now that we, too, occupy and uncomfortable interregnum between two social formations – we will find it in ourselves to put away childish things and write something new.” Assuming this contention has some validity, is contemporary American art similarly retrogressive?
