I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature (review)

Peter Swirski, ed. I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature. Quebec: McGill-Queen UP, 2011. 214 pp. $24.95.Enraptured by the beauty of the general architecture surrounding Washington DC, Peter Swirski introduces I Sing Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature as a book of history and literary criticism in the hope that it will help put an end to history repeating itself repeating itself (11). In this way, Swirski's edited collection presents a determined group of articles that, in his opinion, will challenge the rule of the American Empire under the Bush II administration and swiftly bring the United States to narrative and critical justice (10). As such, the contributing authors- David Rampton, Michael Zeitlin, Gordon E. Slethaug, Nicholas Ruddick, and Swirski himself-all critically engage various post World War II American works of literature and film as narratives that seek to end the rule of American imperialism.In the opening chapter, Stupidity's Progress: Philip Roth and Twentieth- Century American History, David Rampton interrogates the relationship between the novel and the American (24) by identifying different kinds of stupidity (14) and focusing on the ways in which Roth's late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fiction represents American living. After analyzing some of Roth's most recent novels, Rampton concludes that because leftand right wing political parties cannot set their political agendas aside to consider ways of improving America, they end up functioning as allies who together stymie the actualization of the American Dream itself.Also interested in the idea of the American Dream, Swirski's The Historature of the American Empire: Joseph Heller's uses the Greek and Dutch empires as a critical lens to view the American empire. For Swirski, Picture This has no illusions about life in a liberal democracy (59); rather, Swirski goes on to claim that a democratic country is very rarely guaranteed any peaceful form of governance. Swirski faithfully continues to explore the ideas of American imperialism and the American dream when he notes, [I]f Heller's historical summa teaches anything, it is that the more things do not change, the more they remain the same (78). That is why, for Swirski, Heller's idea of stasis does not challenge American imperialism, which, after comparing Saddam Hussein's dictatorial rule of to Bush II's imperialist term over America, Swirski is able to question Bush II's involvement in the War.Also looking through a historical lens, Michael Zeitlin's The American Wars: History and Prophecy in Vietnam, the Gulf, and Iraq examines the ways novels about the Vietnam, Gulf and Wars impact memory and historical repetition in American social culture (86). Zeitlin uses such war films as Green Berets (1968) and Platoon (1986), as well as the novels Quiet American (1955) and Jarhead (2003), to generate an American cultural timeline that draws on military voices as a way to connect the history and future of American soldiers at war. Vacillating between texts and films, Zeitlin claims that a Gulf War text like Jarhead looks back to Vietnam in order to see into the future, and in this sense Vietnam is its fundamental epistemological baseline, serving as Jarhead's historical marker of war (95). Zeitlin again uses Jarhead's war narrative and, to a lesser extent, Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf (1999) as a way of prophesying the many deaths that are to come in the War through the events of the Gulf War. Thus, Vietnam becomes the historical and prophetic battle for the Gulf War, and the Gulf War, in turn, becomes the historical and prophetic battle for the War. Zeitlin closes his article by looking to the newly elected Barack Obama as the catalyst who will end the war in and alter the history of war. …

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