Intimate Strangers

July 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.

July 15, 2014
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.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2014

Ritivoi (English, Carnegie Mellon Univ.; Yesterday's Self) considers four leading intellectuals--Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said--from an unusual and illuminating angle. All of these figures were foreigners who wished to influence American public opinion. In doing so, they faced the traditional suspicion of the stranger: they responded by using this suspicion for their own purposes, making their strangeness a source of fascination and insight. Ritivoi in part takes her thesis from Arendt, who wrote about the pariah; she offers a sensitive discussion of Arendt's controversial views on racial discrimination and the Adolpf Eichmann trial. Marcuse, like Arendt, came from Weimar Germany, though he held very different political views; but, like her, he endeavored to use his foreignness to influence American thought. The same holds true of Solzhenitsyn and Said, despite their sharp divergence in outlook. It is no coincidence, Ritivoi holds, that her subjects devoted careful thought to the place of the foreigner. Arendt explicitly addressed the topic, and all of the others were well aware of her ideas. VERDICT Essential reading for students of literature, philosophy, and post-World War II American intellectual history. --David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., OH

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.