In his The Plot against America, Philip Roth develops a systematic critique of the totalizing narratives that envision history as the site of progressive unfolding or manifestation of a transcendent ideal or force. Depicting the ordeals of an American Jewish family in the alternative historical period of the anti-Semitic Lindbergh administration, Roth seeks to undermine the notion of historical necessity that is central to all versions of universal history. Further, the novel exposes the ideological implications of the grand narratives of historical progress that struggle for hegemony in the social field, including the liberal democratic version upon which the protagonist Philip’s family founds its American self-image and the fascist one that eventually comes to replace it as the dominant American historical outlook.

Philip Roth’s The Plot against America partakes of the postmodern repudiation of metanarratives in systematically exposing the essentialist suppositions informing various totalizing versions of history. Accordingly, by means of an alternative history that sees America going fascist in the novel, Roth seeks to undermine not only the liberal democratic version of history as a progressive movement toward a harmonious social existence but also the notion of historical necessity fundamental to all grand narratives of chronological social development. Paradoxically, the novel realistically depicts an American Jewish family’s ordeals in the fictive era of the anti-Semitic Lindbergh administration. This turbulent counter-history begins with the nomination of Charles A. Lindbergh, the aviation hero and a Nazi sympathizer, as the Republican candidate against Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) seeking his third term in the 1940 presidential election. In a landslide, Lindbergh is elected the thirtythird president of the United States. Dramatizing how a series of events triggered by this historical shift destabilizes the Roths, a working class American Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, the novel explores several significant issues related to the processes of perceiving and representing the domain of history.

The Plot against America imagines Lindbergh’s presidency as having run from 1940 to 1942. At first, as a colonel in the Army Air Corps, Lindbergh makes it his mission to prevent America from entering the World War II, a goal that makes him “an idol of the isolationists—and the enemy of FDR” (Roth 2005, 12)1. Lindbergh’s rise in American politics is a direct result of his success in constructing the American Jewry as an enemy within, a community trying to lure the nation into the war. Moreover, he is convinced “that the best protection against the spread of Communism . . . was the total destruction of Stalin’s Soviet Union by the military might of the Third Reich” (179). As the Lindbergh administration takes over the country, the American Jewry experiences fears and anxieties much similar to those marking the beginning of what the European Jews endured around the same period.

American Literature Journal, Amor in Pound, Classical European Literature, Homosexuality, Diastasis, Olga-Circe-Artemis, Heterosexual Love, Homosexual Love.