In this major new book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have written in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne--three highly articulate and alarmed witnesses to the great crisis in modern intellectual history, the professionalization of science. It was, Limon argues, especially difficult for American writers to face this crisis because, since America had been born in an age of expanding scientific consciousness and thus no appeal could be made to traditional, pre-scientific values.

Almost all twentieth-century philosophy stresses the immanence of death in human life-as drive (Freud), as the context of Being (Heidegger), as the essence of our defining ethics (Levinas), or as language (de Man, Blanchot). In Death's Following, John Limon makes use of literary analysis (of Sebald, Bernhard, and Stoppard), cultural analysis, and autobiography to argue that death is best conceived as always transcendentally beyond ourselves, neither immanent nor imminent. Adapting Kierkegaard's variations on the theme of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac while refocusing the emphasis onto Isaac, Limon argues that death should be imagined as if hiding at the end of an inexplicable journey to Moriah. The point is not to evade or ignore death but to conceive it more truly, repulsively, and pervasively in its camouflage: for example, in jokes, in logical puzzles, in bowdlerized folk songs. The first of Limon's two key concepts is adulthood: the prolonged anti-ritual for experiencing the full distance on the look of death. His second is dirtiness, as theorized in a Jewish joke, a logical exemplum, and T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday": In each case, unseen dirt on foreheads suggests the invisibility of inferred death. Not recognizing death immediately or admitting its immanence and imminence is for Heidegger the defining characteristic of the "they," humanity in its inauthentic social escapism. But Limon vouches throughout for the mediocrity of the "they" in its dirty and ludicrous adulthood. Mediocrity is the privileged position for previewing death, in Limon's opinion: practice for being forgotten. In refusing the call of twentieth-century philosophy to face death courageously, Limon urges the ethical and aesthetic value of mediocre anti-heroism.

Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century identifies and explores what has emerged as perhaps the central theme of 21st-century American fiction: the desire to escape—from the commodified present, from directionless history, from moral death—at a time of inescapable globalization. The driving question is how to find an alternative to the world within the world, at a time when utopian and messianic ideals have lost their power to compel belief. John Limon traces the American answer to that question in the writings of some of the most important authors of the last two decades—Chabon, Diaz, Foer, Eggers, Donoghue, Groff, Ward, Saunders, and Whitehead, among others—and finds that it always involves the faux utopian freedom and pseudo-messianic salvation of childhood. When contemporary novelists feature actual historical escape, pervasively from slavery or Nazism, it appears in their novels as escape envy or escape nostalgia—as if globalization like slavery or Nazism could be escaped in a direction, from this place to another. Thus the closing of the world frontier inspires a mirror messianism and utopianism that in US novels can only be rendered as a performative, momentary, chiasmic relationship between precocious kids and their ludic guardians.

Writing After War develops a theory of the relationship of war in general to literature in general, to make sense of American literary history in particular. The Iliad, Limon argues, inaugurates literary history on the failure of war to be formally beautiful.

Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century identifies and explores what has emerged as perhaps the central theme of 21st-century American fiction: the desire to escape—from the commodified present, from directionless history, from moral death—at a time of inescapable globalization. The driving question is how to find an alternative to the world within the world, at a time when utopian and messianic ideals have lost their power to compel belief. John Limon traces the American answer to that question in the writings of some of the most important authors of the last two decades—Chabon, Diaz, Foer, Eggers, Donoghue, Groff, Ward, Saunders, and Whitehead, among others—and finds that it always involves the faux utopian freedom and pseudo-messianic salvation of childhood. When contemporary novelists feature actual historical escape, pervasively from slavery or Nazism, it appears in their novels as escape envy or escape nostalgia—as if globalization like slavery or Nazism could be escaped in a direction, from this place to another. Thus the closing of the world frontier inspires a mirror messianism and utopianism that in US novels can only be rendered as a performative, momentary, chiasmic relationship between precocious kids and their ludic guardians.

In this 1990 book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have approached the writing of fiction (and justified that writing) in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne - three highly articulate and highly alarmed witnesses to the professionalisation of science, the great crisis in modern intellectual history. It was, he argues, especially specially difficult for American writers to face this crisis since they could make no appeal to traditional values: America, after all, had never really been a pre-scientific society.

"Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America" is the first study of stand-up comedy as a form of art. John Limon appreciates and analyzes the specific practice of stand-up itself, moving beyond theories of the joke, of the comic, and of comedy in general to read stand-up through the lens of literary and cultural theory. Limon argues that stand-up is an artform best defined by its fascination with the abject, Julia Kristeva's term for those aspects of oneself that are obnoxious to one's sense of identity but that are nevertheless--like blood, feces, or urine--impossible to jettison once and for all. All of a comedian's life, Limon asserts, is abject in this sense.
Limon begins with stand-up comics in the 1950s and 1960s--Lenny Bruce, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Elaine May--when the norm of the profession was the Jewish, male, heterosexual comedian. He then moves toward the present with analyses of David Letterman, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres, and Paula Poundstone. Limon incorporates feminist, race, and queer theories to argue that the "comedification" of America--stand-up comedy's escape from its narrow origins--involves the repossession by black, female, queer, and Protestant comedians of what was black, female, queer, yet suburbanizing in Jewish, male, heterosexual comedy. Limon's formal definition of stand-up as abject art thus hinges on his claim that the great American comedians of the 1950s and 1960s located their comedy at the place (which would have been conceived in 1960 as a location between New York City or Chicago and their suburbs) where body is thrown off for the mind and materiality is thrown off for abstraction--at the place, that is, where American abjection has always found its home.
As the first study of its kind, "Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America" will appeal to a wide audience including those interested in cultural studies, Jewish studies, gender and queer theory.