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This book argues that during the Cold War modern political imagination was held captive by the split between two visions of universality—freedom in the West versus social justice in the East—and by a culture of secrecy that tied national identity to national security. Examining post- 1945 American and Eastern European interpretive novels in dialogue with each other and with postfoundational democratic theory, The Underside of Politics brings to light the ideas, forces, and circumstances that shattered modernity’s promises (such as secularization, autonomy, and rights) on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In this context, literary fictions by Kundera and Roth, Popescu and Coover, Kiš and DeLillo become global as they reveal the trials of popular sovereignty in the “fog of the Cold War” and trace the elements around which its world discourse or global picture is constructed: the atom bomb, Stalinist show trials, anticommunist propaganda, totalitarian terror, secret military operations, and political targeting.
Dwelling insightfully on the articulation of the political in Cold War U. S. and Central-East European fiction, The Underside of Politics makes an original and timely contribution to a number of fields, not least to postmodern studies. Postmodernism, Cucu persuasively argues, is political and must be approached comparatively.
Sorin Radu Cucu writes from the perspective of an exceptional lifelong erudition combined with direct personal experience of some of the political absurdities that he isolates and glosses authoritatively in key literary works of his choice. The Underside of Politics is arguably an indispensable primer, with resonance to students as well as to established scholars, in the contemporary construct of the political as it pertains to literary productions and other cultural artifacts.
