Intimate Strangers: Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said in American Political Discourse

by Andreea Ritivoi

Overview

Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said each steered major intellectual and political schools of thought in American political discourse after World War II, yet none of them was American, which proved crucial to their ways of arguing and reasoning both in and out of the American context. In an effort to convince their audiences they were American enough, these thinkers deployed deft rhetorical strategies that made their cosmopolitanism feel acceptable, inspiring radical new approaches to longstanding problems in American politics. Speaking like natives, they also exploited their foreignness to entice listeners to embrace alternative modes of thought.

Intimate Strangers unpacks this "stranger ethos," a blend of detachment and involvement that manifested in the persona of a prophet for Solzhenitsyn, an impartial observer for Arendt, a mentor for Marcuse, and a victim for Said. Yet despite its many successes, the stranger ethos did alienate many audiences, and critics continue to dismiss these thinkers not for their positions but because of their foreign point of view. This book encourages readers to reject this kind of critical xenophobia, throwing support behind a political discourse that accounts for the ideals of citizens and noncitizens alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231168694
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	11/26/2024
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Andreea Deciu Ritivoi is professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on immigration, exile, political discourse, argumentation theory, and intellectual history. She is the author of Yesterday's Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity and Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Stranger Persona
2. Hannah Arendt: The Thinker and the American Republic
3. Herbert Marcuse's German Revolution in America
4. Cold War Prophesies: Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mythological America
5. Edward Said and the Clash of Identities
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

A superb endeavor to understand the thorny dialectics of uprootedness and the reinvention of intellectuals forced into exile by the ideological follies of the twentieth century. This book is not only a major achievement in intellectual history but also a vibrant invitation to empathy, lucidity, and moral clarity.

Vladimir Tismaneanu

This book is important. It is ambitious, thorough and sensitively written by one whom herself is an intimate stranger in America. It is about the discourse of foreign intellectuals and their receptions. Intimate Strangers highlights the diverse stories of four iconic figures—Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said—and how their "stranger personas" were ambivalently received in America. It says as much about American culture as it does about "foreign" intellectuals. This book is a "must-read" for anyone interested in the politics and challenges of cultural identity.

Michael Krausz Michael Krausz

Andreea Ritivoi provides a combination of poignant biography with insightful analysis of how the rhetorical strategy of the stranger persona reveals the tightrope that we walk when we converse in the public sphere with those who are part of a social configuration that we enter from the outside. The insight she provides into this insider/outsider relation is bolstered by the rigor and concreteness of her analysis of the public rhetoric of four prominent immigrant intellectuals during their sojourn in the U.S. just before and after the Second World War.

Fred Evans

Ritivoi lends her lucid, careful, well balanced analysis to a topic to which our years of heightened suspicion concede heightened relevance. She offers a wealth of material on the American, German, Russian and Palestinian historical and cultural contexts in a mix organized according to the variety of Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said's stranger personae. I would have titled this book Hannah and Her Others, had I written it. But I have not.

Calin-Andrei Mihailescu

This book is important. It is ambitious, thorough and sensitively written by one whom herself is an intimate stranger in America. It is about the discourse of foreign intellectuals and their receptions. Intimate Strangers highlights the diverse stories of four iconic figures—Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said—and how their "stranger personas" were ambivalently received in America. It says as much about American culture as it does about "foreign" intellectuals. This book is a "must-read" for anyone interested in the politics and challenges of cultural identity.

Michael Krausz

07/28/2014
Ritivoi (Paul Ricoeur) examines four émigrés—Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said—who indelibly altered the United States’s political landscape and developed the paradigm of the “stranger persona.” Ritivoi claims that these thinkers’ pointed critiques of U.S. politics and culture did not arise in spite of their outsider status, but because of it. Too often xenophobia caused these reproaches to fall on deaf ears. The majority of the book parses each thinker’s intellectual and political contributions but falls short of establishing an overarching analysis or a robust theoretical framework. Similarly, the biographies themselves are of mixed quality. Ritivoi’s commentary on Arendt is rote and superficial; likewise, her account of Marcuse repeatedly references the same trifling anecdote. However, her take on Solzhenitsyn, and the unique admiration and rejection his assertions inspired, as well as Said’s political maturation are dynamic and compelling. Although flawed, Ritivoi’s work launches worthy lines of inquiry concerning the reception of foreign analysis and what it reveals about the U.S.’s self-image. Despite its unevenness, the book is charming and accessible introduction to these thinkers’ influence on American political discourse. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

2014-06-30
A scholarly exercise imparting astute observations about the reception of immigrants and their enormous contributions to their adopted society.Taking four very different "foreigners" in America, Ritivoi (English/Carnegie Mellon Univ.; Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory, 2006, etc.) delineates how each challenged the prevailing political discourse and even changed it for the better. In spite of the criticism and suspicion surrounding their "foreignness"—Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse came from Germany, Alexander Solzhenitsyn from Russia, all three struggled with English, while Edward Said attended Harvard and inherited his Palestinian father's U.S. citizenship—these four intellectuals had a profound, even prophetic effect on the "citizen ethos" that never quite accepted them. The four used what Ritivoi calls their "stranger persona" to generate original ideas and impart the vision of an impartial observer, desperately lacking in the rather closed-minded, self-congratulatory society that America had become after World War II. Although foreigners were welcomed as part of the founding myth of the country, and accepted, like Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier, as "enlightened travelers," the intellectuals who were forced here by oppression in their own countries were viewed with suspicion, considered arrogant and "undesirable." Yet these four immigrants did not hesitate to use certain effective rhetorical devices in their writings to counter these tenacious "habits of exclusion." For example, Arendt employed irony in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) to unsettle notions of sentimental patriotism; Marcuse used his revolutionary notoriety to forge political activism; Solzhenitsyn found in the jeremiad of his 1978 Harvard commencement address the vehicle with which to urge America to return to its founding greatness; Said used denunciation in Orientalism and elsewhere to underscore the hypocrisy of Western liberalism.A finely argued contribution to the discussion of immigration, its decidedly scholarly bent notwithstanding.

Kirkus Reviews