Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Irving, John (Vol. 112) - Evan Carton (essay date Fall 1986)

1. Printable Version
2. Download PDF
3. Cite this Page

Evan Carton (essay date Fall 1986)

SOURCE: "The Politics of Selfhood: Bob Slocum, T. S. Garp and Auto-American-Biography," in Novel, Vol. 20, No. 1, Fall, 1986, pp. 41-61.

[In the following excerpt, Carton examines "the issue of the individual's uncertain identity and political complicity" in The World According to Garp.]

As an idea and a commodity, the personalized life in America numbers among our most popular notions. This curious cultural circumstance reflects the disparity that various critics have observed between our governing model of selfhood and its consequences: that of a privileged, personally empowered and singularly expressive identity whose realization, in Fredric Jameson's words, ironically "maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyzes our thinking about time and change just as surely as it alienates us from our speech itself." Such an irony is hardly new in American literature. Indeed, Sacvan Bercovitch takes...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass

1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Jack Beatty (review date 23 September 1981)
   2. Caryn Fuoroli (review date January 1982)
   3. Evan Carton (essay date Fall 1986)
   4. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges (essay date 1986)
   5. Wendy Steiner (review date 19 May 1989)
   6. Robert Towers (review date 20 July 1989)
   7. Edward C. Reilly (essay date 1991)
   8. Kim McKay (essay date Winter 1992)
   9. Raymond J. Wilson III (essay date Fall 1992)
   10. Irving Weinman (review date 9 April 1993)
   11. Robert Towers (review date 4 September 1994)
   12. Sven Birkerts (review date 4 February 1996)
   13. Andrew Rosenheim (review date 4 February 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright