ABSTRACT
In Chapter 6, I will show how Sinclair Lewis’s America is very plainly a world of language—not simply dialects, but the very lore of the land, easily used and abused by the rhetoric of power, particularly in It Can’t Happen Here (1935), Lewis’s shockingly prescient tale of a reality-TV America wholly realistic in the Gilded Age of Trump. Through a close reading of linguistic metaphors that are hardly metaphors, I will show how Lewis’s presumably satirical realism is actually reflexive and self-conscious, adequating the semiotics of social life with the semiotics of psychological inwardness. As in James, the motif of language within the self and outside it deconstructs the difference between what is personal and what is political.
