engleski

Revolution, Realism, Document: A Triangulation

Hannah Arendt reads the Declaration of Independence as a document whose framing of the American Revolution is decisive to the meaning and function of documents in modernity, not least because its assertion of independence entails the independence of the document itself from a preordained instance of authorship or authority. This suggests that document receives its modern definition from revolution, and is tasked above all with securing a template that contains modern subjectivation (what Thomas Jefferson, and Arendt in his wake, call “the American mind”). Drawing on Arendt’s understanding of realism, which in many ways derives from this particular coming together of document and revolution, I propose to analyze how realism, rather than reinforcing the modern document, serves to disrupt its claim to subjectivation, demanding that revolution be reconsidered. It is in light of this that I will then discuss how literature engages realism, as well as a sense of contemporaneity that underlies it.

revolution, realism, document, Hannah Arendt

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