imperial confidence at the end of the “American Century” that Shteyngart anatomizes. Menippean elements well describe the texture and structure of Gary Shteyngart’s fiction and the crisis in U.S. The result is an anxious, angry, labyrinthine, fragmented, stubbornly contrarian text. It is encyclopedic in range and ambition, absorbing and parodying different discourses and genres while constructing a narrative via debates, fantasies, annotations (either within the text or in footnotes and/or appendices), and other rhetorical devices. Although it may feature memorable characters, the Menippean mode primarily targets diseased and dangerous ideas or habits. It protests cultural decadence and decline by incorporating contradiction into its form, using "at least two other genres, languages, cultures, or changes of voice to oppose a dangerous, false, or specious and threatening orthodoxy" (6). Howard Weinbrot argues that Menippean satire tends to be produced in eras of "broken or fragile national, cultural, religious, political or generally intellectual values" (7).
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