Knowable Conspiracies: Ideology and Form in Jonathan Franzen’s The Twenty-Seventh City
Keywords:
Jonathan Franzen, critical reception, postmodernist novel, realism, ideology.
Abstract
The narrative work of American novelist Jonathan Franzen has undeniably been neglected by academic criticism, a circumstance which is even more evident as regards his early fiction. It is the case that a significant part of such (scarce) critical attention as there is has focused on political questions and has generally dismissed Franzen’s professedly progressive engagement as unsound and counter-productive. This article departs from that reception —to which it acknowledges a point— and seeks to complement it by providing a wider ideological analysis of Franzen’s first novel. With this aim, we relate the novel to its specific historical and cultural context and we explore its Utopian content in the light of Jameson’s theory of narrative. In addition, we address the political import inherent in the particular novelistic form used by Franzen, a process which involves questioning the generally accepted accounts of Franzen’s stylistic evolution from postmodernism to realism.
Published
2015-12-23
Section
ARTICLES: Literature, film and cultural studies

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).