American Culture's Arrested Development: A Literary Critique

Jonathan Stevenson argues that American culture is stuck in a state of arrested development, perpetually reverting to a national adolescence rooted in a self-image of fledgling prodigy. He references Leslie Fiedler's mid-century work "Love and Death in the American Novel," which contrasted the sober maturity of European literature with the exceptionalist puerility of American fiction. Becca Rothfeld's recent New Yorker piece rehabilitates this perspective, suggesting that amid the ruins of the East Wing and the post-war liberal order, Americans might finally put away childish things and write something new. The article questions whether contemporary American art can transcend this adolescent impulse.