Unhappy Archives in Realist Fiction: the Failure of the American Dream in American Pastoral and Flesh and Blood

Abstract

In this paper we explore the novels American Pastoral, by Philip Roth, and Flesh and Blood, by Michael Cunningham, in order to trace the affective mapping that emerges in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, once the promise of happiness – linked to the American dream – loses its value as an intergenerational cement. The theoretical framework employed includes Hayden White’s considerations on witness literature and recent work by affective turn theorists. This article claims that the value of these novels lies not only in their ability to picture the historicity of the experience of that time, but also in their ability to rethink the ideal of happiness in relation to national, racial and sexual beliefs, and in relation to the notion of contingency.