Comforting Myths: Concerning the Political in Art

by Rabih Alameddine

Overview

A timely and urgent inquiry by one of global literature's leading lights

In this concisely argued and illuminating book, the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author Rabih Alameddine takes the subject of politics and art head-on, questioning the very premise of dividing these two pillars of culture into an either/or proposition. He reveals how a political dimension enlarges a work of art rather than making it less beautiful or reducing it to a polemic, as we are so often and carelessly taught. But he also ponders what makes art political to begin with: how essential is the artist’s conscious political intent, and what does the reader or viewer contribute to the work’s political capability or significance? In exploring these questions, Alameddine engages intensely with his role as an immigrant and a gay author writing inside a globally dominant, often oblivious culture, and invokes the work of numerous writers, from Tayeb Salih and Aleksandar Hemon to Teju Cole and Salman Rushdie, who also struggle to be heard as something more than an “other.” The book features throughout Alameddine’s brilliantly relatable voice—shrewd, humorous, challenging, and as honest about his own limitations as he is about his passions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813952512
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	10/22/2024
Series:	Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Lectures
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	4.75(w) x 7.25(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Rabih Alameddine is an award-winning fiction writer and Chair of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. His most recent novel is The Wrong End of the Telescope.

What People are Saying About This

Rebecca Solnit

Not everyone was born to rant, but Rabih Alameddine was, and I am so here for all and any of his rants, tirades, and manifestos, most especially this furiously excellent one that puts 'apolitical' in its place, which is to say in the trash. That is, Rabih reminds us everything is political, and apolitical is a fiction that makes the most comfortable beneficiaries of the status quo just a smidgen more comfortable. 

Aminatta Forna

Biting, unflinchingly honest and funny, Alameddine leads the sacred cows of the contemporary Western literary canon to the slaughter. From the inextricability of art from politics, to the selective deafness of the publishing world which tunes out uncomfortable truths, to the absurdity of ‘world literature’ and who gets to tell stories and on behalf of whom, he skewers, with precision and wit, current orthodoxies of the liberal literary establishment. 

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/16/2024

In this trenchant treatise, Lebanese American novelist Alameddine (The Wrong End of the Telescope) pushes back against the argument that “art should be separate from politics.” He contends that all art is political and that writing only appears apolitical if it “reinforces the dominant society’s values.” For instance, Alameddine argues that John Updike’s decision to write about “stultifying suburbia” at the height of the Vietnam War should be considered as political as Tim O’Brien’s war fiction. An author’s racial identity often determines whether their work is considered “political,” Alameddine posits, lamenting that Alice Munro’s short stories are often viewed as universal while James Baldwin’s fiction is deemed “more political, or more dated, or more fill in the blank.” In the book’s most searching passages, Alameddine reflects with ambivalence on how his Lebanese American background positions him as a “cute other” whose novels about Arab characters are at once “domesticated” enough to not ruffle feathers and yet “exotic” enough to make white people feel open-minded for reading them. Alameddine’s lucid analysis cuts to the heart of contemporary discussions about the intersections of politics, identity, and fiction. This is essential reading. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi, Inc. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

A provocative treatise by one of our most important literary writers on the role of politics in literature. Like all of his work, it is both wise and funny.

Amy Tan

2024-08-30
Two lectures look to unsettle audiences complacent about the role of politics in contemporary fiction.

Lebanese-born novelist Alameddine is the author of six novels, most recentlyThe Wrong End of the Telescope. This slim volume consists of two essays that he delivered as lectures, the second of which was published inHarper’s Magazine in 2018. In both, he plays the role of political gadfly. The first essay begins with the assertion that “every time I talk politics in this country, I notice that people’s faces go blank. Never fails.” He goes on to question the assumption that political novels are necessarily inferior, and to make a case that all novels are in fact political. “If a novel reinforces the dominant culture’s values, that culture will not think of the novel as political; if it doesn’t, it will,” he writes. “If John Updike writes a novel about a white man’s life, is it not identity politics?” In the book’s second lecture, the author writes about himself and others involved in “this world literature thing”—including Amy Tan, Junot Díaz, and Salman Rushdie—as being coopted by American universities and of being “safe, domesticated, just exotic enough to make readers feel they are liberal.” They are, he says, “the cute other,” not the “utterly strange other, the other who can’t stand you.” Alameddine might not always be convincing, but he is consistently entertaining.

A provocative pair of essays.

Kirkus Reviews