That's a terrible piece of writing. It reads like the canned essays sold to students. It mentions all the checklist items from the syllabus but has little to say.
The article starts out by referencing "American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers", which, he says, is is challenging Francis Fukuyama's view of the world. Nobody needed to do that in 2015. Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" came out in 1992. Fukuyama was writing about the world situation at the time, which looked good. The USSR had come apart non-violently, the US and Russia were getting along, there were no major wars in progress, and liberal democracy seemed triumphant. Fukuyama thought that "history", seen as battles and conflicts, might be over, and things would settle down.
By 2015, nobody needed to put effort into arguing against that idea.
Then the author goes off in another direction, arguing that American literature has an imperial bent. There was a time when British literature certainly did. Read Kipling's tales of India under the Raj. There were periods when American literature did. Jules Verne goes over the top on that in "From the Earth to the Moon". Eisenhower's "Crusade in Europe" took that path. But now? Not so much. The bent in serious American literature today seems to be guilt. Serious books have to be about racism, sexism, gay problems, homelessness, ecological damage, or something similar that readers of serious literature can feel guilty about. Take a look at this week's lead books in the New York Times Review of Books.[1] Guilt is a predominant theme.
Then the author rants about individualist orthodoxy. To see individualist orthodoxy, look at popular movies. Almost always, there is a hero, who, through their own individual acts, accomplishes something important. History rarely reads like that. Books, which have more space and time than a movie, tend not to be as hero-focused. If they are, the author has dreams of selling the movie rights.
The author goes on and on, in various directions, but doesn't get anywhere. If the author took one of their ideas and developed it, they might have said something.
The article starts out by referencing "American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers", which, he says, is is challenging Francis Fukuyama's view of the world. Nobody needed to do that in 2015. Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" came out in 1992. Fukuyama was writing about the world situation at the time, which looked good. The USSR had come apart non-violently, the US and Russia were getting along, there were no major wars in progress, and liberal democracy seemed triumphant. Fukuyama thought that "history", seen as battles and conflicts, might be over, and things would settle down.
By 2015, nobody needed to put effort into arguing against that idea.
Then the author goes off in another direction, arguing that American literature has an imperial bent. There was a time when British literature certainly did. Read Kipling's tales of India under the Raj. There were periods when American literature did. Jules Verne goes over the top on that in "From the Earth to the Moon". Eisenhower's "Crusade in Europe" took that path. But now? Not so much. The bent in serious American literature today seems to be guilt. Serious books have to be about racism, sexism, gay problems, homelessness, ecological damage, or something similar that readers of serious literature can feel guilty about. Take a look at this week's lead books in the New York Times Review of Books.[1] Guilt is a predominant theme.
Then the author rants about individualist orthodoxy. To see individualist orthodoxy, look at popular movies. Almost always, there is a hero, who, through their own individual acts, accomplishes something important. History rarely reads like that. Books, which have more space and time than a movie, tend not to be as hero-focused. If they are, the author has dreams of selling the movie rights.
The author goes on and on, in various directions, but doesn't get anywhere. If the author took one of their ideas and developed it, they might have said something.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/section/books