Working Bibliography (Nov. 15th assignment)

Andrew McCormick

ENGL 701/Graduate Methodology

Prof. Richter

Draft of Annotated Working Biblio.

15 Nov. 2010

Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. (1939). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.

Since it was, after all, Reed’s discussion of elements of the postmodern in this book that gave impetus to my interest in the emergence of the postmodern in 30’s fiction, I should probably read it to understand where Reed is coming from, not to mention that the text itself is widely considered an important piece of 30’s writing on poverty and class exploitation.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 2^nd ed. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 1995, 2002. Print.

This is another accessible intro to theory book whose chapter on postmodernism has been useful in helping me just generally conceptualize some widely held tenets of the movement or lens.

Connor, Steven. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. Steven Connor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004. Print. 1-19.

Connor, Steven. “Postmodernism and Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. Steven Connor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004. Print. 62-81.

These readings by Steven Connor have helped me to expand my understanding of the concept of postmodernism. Some of Connor’s key points have helped me build upon my understanding of Reed’s assertions about Agee and Evans—among others, that the “attempt to remain responsive to the claims of the other [alienated or ostracized subject] without resorting to the violence of formalization [is what largely] characterizes postmodern ethics” (15). This coincides nicely with Reed’s claims about what Agee and Evans do in Let Us Now… and why these tropes are tenets of postmodernism, even though the term/concept (postmodern(ism)) did not formally exist yet. So encountering another author’s claim that one characteristic of postmodernism is a refusal to readily “formalize” those “others” being written about while still trying to represent them in ways that allow action/change, may help sharpen my focus as I read primary texts, giving me something to look for examples of (or examples of the absence of). Connor’s point, quoted above, also seems not just a little parallel to Lee’s interests in a “Strategic Postmodernism” for her discipline, sociology (see below).

Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. New York: Norton, 2009. Print.

This recent book has proven useful first of all as a tremendously informative, general resource that provides overall context on, as the subtitle suggests, the time period’s cultural history—its major writers and novels, actors, directors and films, and of course in turn the sociological and ideological issues surrounding and informing these various mediums. In turn, it has been an indispensible guide in locating other useful, primary texts (mostly novels) such as Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Michael Gold’s Jews without Money. But more relevant to my developing project, it has pointed me towards one particular author and novel that will no doubt be an object of analysis—Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep; and yet more specifically, it has given me a useful point of contrast to juxtapose with postmodern and poststructural arguments on 30’s fiction, as Dickstein offers a more traditional, liberal-humanist view of Roth’s masterpiece (as does Alfred Kazin), allowing for a nice example of how two divergent theoretical lenses offer competing interpretations of a work.

Kazin, Alfred. “Introduction.” Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934). New York: Picador, 1991. Print.

Like Dickstein, Kazin saw Roth’s work as belonging to the modernist tradition, characterizing Call It Sleep as more akin to Ulysses than to Sister Carrie (xviii). So he offers another example of a liberal humanist critic, one wary, presumably, of poststructuralism and postmodernism. So he will be interesting to contrast with postmodern voices (with whom I will be siding to some extent or another).

Klages, Mary. Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum Books, 2007. Print.

A highly accessible introduction to literary theory; in particular, Klages’s chapter on postmodernism, especially her concise treatment of Jean-Francois Lyotard and his ideas about postmodernism’s refusal to embrace meta- or grand-narratives, has been foundational in my interest in postmodernism and its related lens, poststructuralism.

Lee, Janet. “The Utility of a Strategic Postmodernism.” Sociological Perspectives. 42.4 (1999): 739-753. JSTOR. 06 Oct. 2010. Web.

            A new and potentially interesting, cross-disciplinary source. In short, Lee talks about how of the many disciplines that have found themselves disrupted by postmodernism, sociology is especially ripe for discussion, and for some re-evaluation of the possibilities of compatibility between disciplines and postmodernism as a lens. Lee explains that traditionally, sociology has assumed and insisted upon the need to be empirical, to measure evidence and pose categories of identity, to presume a sense of agency comprised at least in part by common, lived experiences on the part of those being studied. This is especially so when it comes to disenfranchised groups—minorities, women, etc. For rather obvious reasons, Lee explains, postmodernism as a condition or a lens would seem, by its nature, to disrupt these things. But Lee offers some possibilities for a “strategic postmodernism.” Quoting another sociologist, Mike Featherstone, she offers that “there are…lessons to be learned from a postmodern sociology: it focuses attention on ways in which theories are built up, their hidden assumptions, and questions the theorist’s ability to speak for the ‘other’…” (740). This article seems potentially quite compatible with Reed’s discussion of Agee and Evans, and it is worth noting that one point Reed takes issue with is that the text (Let Us Now…) has been recently classed as a sociology book, which he says is problematic. More pressingly, though, it would seem to be precisely the inherent difficulty in “speak[ing] for the ‘other’” to which Featherstone (quoted by Lee) refers, with which Reed is concerned in the work of Agee and Evans.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984. Print.

            One of the theoretical texts I will be hopefully reading to gain a deeper understanding of the lens/movement I will be exploring in depression era lit.

Reed, T.V. “Unimagined Existence and the Fiction of the Real: Postmodernist Realism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Representations. No. 24 (1988): 156-176. JSTOR. Web. 24 Sept. 2010.

This particular article has been tremendously influential in inspiring the specific direction of my developing project; Reed’s assertion that though postmodernism or the postmodern was not yet a conscious concept at the time of Agee’s and Evans’s work, in retrospect these writers’ inherently interdisciplinary approach, embracing the “epistemological problematic” of trying to portray the poor who were most disenfranchised by the Depression, can only be properly called postmodernist. More compellingly, I feel that Reed’s analysis of this particular work offers a useful example of what one might rightly call the usefulness or practicality of examining emerging postmodern tropes in 30’s literature; for to Reed, what most vitally makes this work postmodernist is its tacit—even explicit—acknowledgment that in attempting to portray the poor and oppressed, one must be vigilant in guarding against the tendency of writers and artists at large to simplify and thus infantilize the subject under consideration—in other words, Reed exhibits, I hope, an example of the social applicability of poststructuralism and postmodernism (worth considering in opposition to justifiable attacks on these theoretical lenses).

Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. (1934). New York: Picador, 1991. Print.

Henry Roth’s fascinating, inner-consciousness driven and linguistically rich glimpse into the world of a young boy growing up in turn-of-the-century New York City offers what has turned out to be a great text to explore differing theoretical readings. It will likely be one of several works I end up using to examine emerging elements of the proto-postmodern in thirties fiction.

Solomon, William. “Politics and Rhetoric in the Novel in the 1930’s.” American Literature. 68.4 (1996): 799-818. JSTOR. 22 Oct. 2010. Web.

Solomon allows me to add to the growing roster of voices “convinced,” as he himself puts it, that prose fiction of the 30’s was trying to do something epistemologically complex and thus goes beyond the limits of naturalism and realism. Examining several oft-called proletarian novels, his close readings offer an inspiring example of a modern-day re-visitation of works long-dismissed as heavy-handed and excessively leftist. Solomon writes, “I am convinced that in the thirties an entirely different way of looking at the relationship between politics and literature was struggling to emerge, and that the failure of past critics to acknowledge this fact has obscured valuable ideas and precise observations” (800). At a general level, it is useful to have one more critic, to offer as growing evidence of a mainstream re-consideration of Depression-era literature. More important, though, are Solomon’s revealing arguments about how “a few leftist novelists in the thirties made rhetoric…the ground of their interventions into the political,” adding that “certain writers of this time put to excellent use insights we now associate with rhetorically inspired literary theory,” which Solomon says included “an at times extreme skepticism towards the referential reliability of the realist modes of narration” as well as “a rigorous understanding of the structure and function of tropes” (800). These particular assertions are not dissimilar to ones made by Dickstein and Kazin, liberal-humanist voices, and actually share some common ground with Reed’s argument for the presence of “postmodernist realism” in Agee and Evans.

Assignment 2 pt. 1

Andrew McCormick

ENGL 701: Graduate Methodology

Prof. Richter

Article Assignment Pt. 1

27 Sept. 2010

My Developing Question

Of the many themes found in literature that interest me, one that is yet to be equaled is how it has reflected and been in dialogue with class, specifically poverty and privilege. I am also increasingly interested, as I learn more about theory and criticism, in the emergence of postmodernism and the ways it has augmented but also conflicted with earlier lenses. These two interests have lately come together for me; in particular, I have grown curious about the ways in which postmodernism in literature has interacted with earlier, more traditional representations of social class and power struggles. I get the sense that while earlier lenses, especially, say, naturalism and realism, were often openly political (arguably to the point of being didactic in some cases), in the poststructural and postmodern lenses, politics and power struggles cannot be (re)presented too explicitly or polemically, as this would be to simplify identity and reality in ways incompatible with the poststructural and postmodern dictums that narratives and events, particularly solutions and res/revolutions can be, at best, “temporal” and “contingent” to use the words in one theory book (Klages 169).

A year or so ago, when I was working on an essay on William Saroyan’s short story “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” set in the Great Depression, my research revealed some interesting debates about the author, including to what extent he might be variously categorized as, among other things, a romantic, an existentialist, some blend of the two (Shinn, Floan NP), or a modernist whose work occupies the bridge, or, as one writer put it, “a critical point of least convenience between the first wave of Modernism […] and that new wave of Postmodernism—Kerouac, most obviously—that he is shown to have influenced” (Locklin NP). This piqued my curiosity as to what other works (by Saroyan as well as other authors) written and/or set during the Great Depression might be considered or argued to have elements of what one could perhaps call the proto-postmodern. Moreover, I grapple with the question, if certain among such works of the 30’s can be argued to exhibit developing tenets of postmodernism while still being fundamentally or partly grounded in some other lens or movement, say naturalism-tinted modernism or just straightforward, didactic proletarian radicalism, how might one reconcile the apparent disjunction between the traditionalism of the former and the professed instability of language and identity inherent to the latter? This is my area of concern, my developing question, for the time being.

Much more recently, for this assignment, I found an article from the late 1980’s, published in Representations, on the famous, seminal 30’s work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by Walker Evans and James Agee. In it, T.V. Reed argues for a “postmodernist realism” in this book which, he explains, is very difficult to categorize.[1] Reed explains that although the term and movement now called “postmodernism” was not around in the 1930’s, that there are still distinctly postmodern elements to Evans’s and Agee’s interdisciplinary work (157).

My hope, then, is to build off of, or use as a starting point, Reed’s argument about Evans’s and Agee’s work, seeking similar (but hopefully not identical) phenomena in other works of the time. The “postmodernist realism” (156) Reed argues in favor of, which simultaneously represents the disenfranchisement of the impoverished, also refuses, Reed explains, simplifying binaries, categorizations, or, most vitally, the unwitting fetishization of the poor sometimes produced in mimetic and didactic writings in literary fiction that merely serves to further Other the impoverished and reinforce comparatively privileged readers’ position of power (Reed 168-69). Hence, explains Reed, the blended, partly literary, partly journalism/documentary, occasionally sociological nature of this complex, multi-natured text that refuses to be labeled as the province of one discipline just as it refuses to be traditionally, meta-narratively labeled the property or product of any one ism or political ethos. With this type of postmodern analysis in mind, I hope to examine similar intersections of the postmodern and the (naturalism/realism influenced-) political in the work of such writers as Saroyan as well as, perhaps, Erskine Caldwell, Henry Roth and one or two others of the 30’s. At this point, Saroyan is the 30’s writer of primary interest to me; the others mentioned here are possibilities.

Clearly, Reed’s article, “Unimagined Existence and the Fiction of the Real: Postmodernist Realism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” (1988) is at this point my critical touchstone. But I have also found useful ideas to incorporate and build upon in Morris Dickstein’s recent book Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, which I am reading and enjoying, and whose references and suggested readings I intend to check out as I continue to develop this bibliography—this book has made it clear to me that Roth’s Call It Sleep is probably also a strong candidate for this type of analysis. I also have a potentially useful historical article, Allen Guttman’s “Think Back on the Thirties,” but I will be seeking more contemporary articles like it from the fields of history and sociology (Guttman’s article is from the sixties, so I will probably not be pursuing too many leads from its bibliography/footnotes). As for primary texts to which I might apply whatever theoretical lenses that develop, as mentioned, these may include Saroyan’s play The Time of Your Life as well as several of his depression-era short stories (including the one mentioned), Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, and Roth’s Call it Sleep. Thus far, I have also consulted Mary Klages’s very accessible literary theory book, but I may likely consult some others, and there is a good chance that I will be seeking more readings, perhaps books, on postmodernism.

Full Annotated Bibliography in Progress:

Agee, James and Evans, Walker. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. (1941). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.

Caldwell, Erskine. Tobacco Road. (1932). Athens, Ga: Brown Thrasher Books, 1995. Print.

Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. New York: Norton, 2009. Print.

Floan, Howard R. William Saroyan. Twayne’s United States Authors’ Series 100. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966. Gale: Cengage Learning. Literature Resources. Web. 05 Sept. 2009, 19 Sept. 2010.  

Guttman, Allen. “Think Back on the Thirties.” The Massachussetts Review. 9.3 (Summer 1968): 605-611. JSTOR. Web. 22 Sept. 2010.

Klages, Mary. Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum, 2007. Print.

Locklin, Gerald. “William Saroyan: A Study of the Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction. 30.2 (Spring 1993). p199. Gale: Cengage Learning. Literature Resources. Web. 17 Aug. 2009, Sept. 2010.

Reed, T.V. “Unimagined Existence and the Fiction of the Real: Postmodernist Realism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Representations. No. 24 (Fall 1988): 156-176. JSTOR. Web. 24 Sept. 2010.

Saroyan, William. “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” The William Saroyan Reader. New York: Barricade Books, 1958, 1994. Print.

Shinn, Thelma J. “William Saroyan: Romantic Existentialist.” Modern Drama. 15.2 (Sept. 1972). p185-194. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism Select. Detroit: Gale. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 Aug. 2009, 24 Sept. 2010.

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[1] Reed notes that the current edition actually classes itself as sociology, which is, he explains, a very problematic categorization for such a work. He also refuses to label it straightforward fiction/literature either, though. More to come on this issue.

assignment 1: analysis of American Literature (journal)

Andrew McCormick

ENGL 701: Graduate Methodology

Prof. Richter

20 Sept. 2010

Journal Assignment 1: Analysis of American Literature

            In sifting through selected works from the 1950’s through the present decade of this preeminent, peer-reviewed journal, one might be struck by its fidelity to the Canon right through a mere decade or so ago. In my own topical analysis[1], it seems safe to speculate that what had long been primarily an interest in canonized writers and traditional, literary themes began to open up to new areas only in the 1990’s or so: by the late part of the last decade, American Literature boasted such cutting-edge works as “Chicano Ethnicity: Cultural Hybridity and the Mestizo Voice” and “Perverse Nature: Edgar Huntly and the Novel’s Reproductive Disorders.”[2] Comparing these contemporary, pluralistic pieces of scholarship to the equivalent issue a mere decade earlier, one is bound to be struck by the journal’s shift in content: the March 1988 edition, by contrast, seems to limit itself to more traditional terrain, featuring articles on “Willa Cather and Domestic Ritual,” “The Development of Dickinson’s Style,” “Frost and Modernism,” and similarly traditional, Canon-upholding material. Absent are any articles in January 1988 by or about minorities or issues of race and related issues.[3]

            A brief discussion of the winter/early spring editions of 1958, ’68 and ’78 will, I hope, illustrate that these editions of American Literature were—in terms of content—much more fundamentally like the March 1988 edition discussed above than those issues that came after it (referring, of course, only to those that I examined, but working with the assumption that they are representative). This suggests to me that some kind of turning point came circa the late 1980’s or early 1990’s, one characterized by a more inclusive, multi-cultural, post-colonial, and post-structuralism-influenced tone which has, it would seem, persisted.[4]

January 1958 features some engaging pieces of scholarship focused primarily on either biographical and/or historical modes of criticism. Oscar Cargill’s article on the alleged influence, particularly concerning moral preoccupations and self-censorship, that William Dean Howells exerted on friend and at times protégé Henry James, seems based perhaps a bit more on historical and biographical information than on presumably needed analysis of the relevant texts themselves, and may strike modern readers of the journal as a bit dry (this being just my take on it, of course). George Roth’s very historicist discussion of the cultural and ideological functions of satire in early, Revolutionary-War era America is similar in this regard, as is George Stewart’s and Joseph Backus’s occasionally biographical, but above all, technical and formal attempt to offer a re-assembling of the “puzzle” that is Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which they explain is to be taken as having, albeit not obvious, a blueprint in which “Each [is] in Its Ordered Place” (the article’s title).

Moving ahead a decade to January of 1968, most of the primary articles seem similarly interested in the author’s lives, the historical factors shaping their work, and often, on what I would understand to be formalist-/New Critic-influenced close readings often intertwined to varying degrees with the historical and/or biographical. Some variety of formalism/New Criticism seems to be the primary modus operandi of Edward Clay’s “The ‘Dominating’ Symbol in Hawthorne’s Last Phase,” which offers an engaging, also rather technical explanation for the inferiority of Hawthorne’s later romances. Another article, Thomas Gullason’s almost purely biographical discussion of Stephen Crane’s childhood and early adolescent years of schooling at Pennington Seminary in New Jersey and this time’s supposed influence on his career trajectory and writing, also seems to lack in relevant connections to the author’s literature itself and come off as a rather bland, at best anecdotal history lesson (which, I suspect, would not fare well in today’s academic market).

Of the many articles I read or skimmed which might appropriately be considered biographical to some extent, one in particular which seemed more nuanced and enduring when thought of in relation to today’s scholarship, owing, I might argue, to a nicely balanced blend of thoughtful analysis of the author’s pertinent texts themselves and the underlying biographical thesis, was Milton A. Mays’s “Henry James, or, The Beast in the Palace of Art.” This is an engaging read which smoothly integrates well-researched biographical information with what one might call close reading of several of James’s popular works, notably the short stories “The Jolly Corner” and “The Beast in the Jungle.”

In James stories like these, the protagonists, whom Mays describes as “Jamesian surrogates,” “are haunted by” a “fear of personal failure [like that which James was apparently afflicted with]” (467). Mays connects his biographical argument about James to the “ambivalence” of the businessman figure in James’s work (his fiction as well as essays) (471-72), whom he describes as scarred by life but having not allowed life to pass him by (as protagonists like Brydon of “The Jolly Corner,” Mays contends, sadly come to realize they’ve done); and, in Mays’s argument, as James himself often feared he had done, given his odd-man-out status as a writer and intellectual in a time and place when the businessman was the default, respectable figure (474). It would seem obvious to say that more recent, speculative questions about James’s sexual preference in the context of a highly intolerant, late nineteenth century America, and how this would have shaped his life experience—including the supposed sense of alienation owing to a lack of active masculinity which Mays speaks of—is not a theme for discussion in this article. This makes one wonder if mainstream academe (and society at large) had apparently not quite yet, in the 1960’s, become adequately liberal for a discussion of homosexuality.

As briefly noted earlier in a footnote, the prize of the January 1968 edition, in my estimation, is Ross Labrie’s groundbreaking “Henry James’s Idea of Consciousness.” Labrie defines Jamesian consciousness as “the power which allows a subject to assimilate his environment—the taking of the macrocosm into the microcosm” (521). In addition to analyzing how James played off of one another characters whose “vessels” of consciousness were larger and more developed and characters whose were smaller and/or less developed; and in addition to considering to what extent James’s fiction examined the idiosyncratic and unique ways that a given person’s consciousness gave rise to particular interests or preoccupations, Labrie also presents biographical evidence of the author’s notion that consciousness is a complex, dynamic and evolving phenomena. Connections are also made to the author’s brother William, whose ideas and interests as a psychologist and philosopher were clearly of influence. In examining how consciousness, for a leading writer and thinker of his time, was a phenomenon that is subtle, amorphous and hard to measure or characterize, Labrie seems to craft a reading which, unlike some of the others in this edition, could, I think, still fare well in today’s post-structuralist climate in which the common consensus seems to be that the unstable, unfixed and frequently shifting thing that is identity is never reducible to one essence or bottom line, never easily pigeonholed. In this sense, it seems an enduring piece of scholarship (particularly when contrasted with some of the straightforward, narrowly historical/biographical readings earlier mentioned).

Another post-structuralist-leaning article in the January 1978 edition, “Evolving the Inscrutable: The Grotesque in Melville’s Fiction,” by Richard M. Cook, contends that Melville’s use of the grotesque serves to question those constructed categories and concepts people use “to make final sense of the world” (549-50). Ultimately, Cook returns to the metaphysical question of the human essence: “The grotesque quality of many of Melville’s characters derives from the fact that, whatever they look like, they behave as though they were not fully human—even as they raise the question of what it means to behave like a human being” (550). In both cases, explains Cook, the “physical[ly] grotesque” and the “behavior[ally] grotesque,” there is a manifest question as to just what we think the human essence is, and if such a thing can really be defined (552-53). 

What would seem to strike modern readers of this article, some three plus decades later, is the absence of any discussion of that quintessential Other not discussed: the racial/ethnic Other. For in the midst of a nuanced, complex analysis of the way that that which seems “grotesque” is in fact indicative of an implicit questioning of those simplified constructs said to account for, or perhaps stand in for the human essence, an otherwise enduring argument that would fare well today, Cook does not delve into racial or ethnic territory, considering how the typically European male characters in Melville’s relevant works project an apparently constructed sense of alien grotesqueness onto non-whites in the service of an old Northern hemisphere/Southern hemisphere-civilized/uncivilized binary.[5] Modern readers, in other words, might be struck at how awkward it would be today to compose such a discussion without an at least partly post-colonial spin (see footnote). This article, then, might be held up as a good example of the ease with which one could discuss identity in depth three decades ago without race and colonialism being central or even peripheral concerns; and, accordingly, of how much more these valuable lenses have rightfully taken center stage since, say, the 1970’s.

Having already briefly discussed the March 1988 edition, which I have said seems a bit behind its times in terms of pluralism/multiculturalism, I move now into the edition of a decade later, which, as mentioned, reveals in its front matter alone that the content of the journal has shifted to accommodate more multicultural themes, particularly as they interact with an increasingly post-structural backdrop in which the stability of identity is constantly suspect. Probably the best example of what I am assuming to be a 1990’s shift toward a more multicultural and post-structural/post-modern body of content in American Literature is Rafael Perez-Torres’s article (March 1998) on “Chicano Ethnicity.” Perez-Torres analyzes, explicitly presenting in light of post-structural developments, the concept and nature of a “Mestizo voice” and identity. He conducts this analysis through examinations of a classic, 1950’s American film, Giant, starring Rock Hudson and Liz Taylor; through Tino Villanueva’s ekphrastic, post-colonial, Chicano-identity reaffirming poem “Scene from the Movie Giant”; and through semi-autobiographical novels by Chicano writer Oscar Acosta. Weighing similar and differing elements of these varied texts of different mediums, Perez-Torres posits that the Mestizo’s “voice,” a multifaceted one evidently employed strategically in different contexts, is indeed “a language in creation,” “articulat[ing] the formation of a culture in transition,” thus slowly but surely serving to “subvert dominant paradigms” (173, 156).

            Also concerned with issues of racial identity and Otherness in America—both in and out of literature—is Lawrence Oliver’s “Writing from the Right during the ‘Red Decade,’” which sheds light on racist, sexist and conservative Southern writer Thomas Dixon’s (of Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation’s influence The Klansman fame) attacks on the left, notably W.E.B. DuBois. In short, Oliver discusses a couple of important factors ripe for analysis in Dixon’s novel The Flaming Sword: that it was “instrumental in shaping what Toni Morrison has termed ‘American Africanism’”, in which Africans and African Americans are “demon[ized]…in order to promote white hegemony” (133).

            With these two March 1998 articles being focused on race/ethnicity and class tensions in twentieth century America, compared with none of the articles sharing these kinds of concerns in the edition from a decade earlier[6], one might, as I suggested earlier, argue that this indicates a shift in the journal’s interests.

            As mentioned, my analysis of three editions from the current decade—March 2003, 2005 and 2008—seems to show a continuance in the journal’s growing interest in pieces of scholarship that shed light on alienated or disenfranchised groups, particularly owing to issues of race/ethnicity, gender, language, and other aspects of identity.           

Examining the contents of the March 2003 edition certainly suggests an increasingly diverse content that perhaps reflects a shifting canon; of the seven primary articles, five are what we might classify as concerned with underrepresented or marginalized peoples and related themes: two are concerned with female identity, two with African American identity, and one with Jewish identity. One article concerns Melville’s book of poems Battle-Pieces, which reflected on the recent Civil War and, according to Deak Nabers, echoed concerns shared by others at the time and since with the paradoxical position the South was in during the reconstruction years given the way in which it was on the one hand legally and ideologically expected to be reincorporated into the Union, but on the other, subordinate to it (Nabers 2). Susan Edmunds considers “The Race Question” and “The Lynching Plot” in Toomer’s Cane, and Namoi Sofer’s discussion of “the complex, conflicted, and often internally contradictory visions of female authorship that abound in postbellum fiction” (22) also clearly concerns itself with a group that has often been overlooked: women writers. Stephanie Foote presents an argument about now abstruse and virtually unknown late nineteenth century New York writer Henry Harland, who wrote novels ostensibly about Jewish life and identity under a Jewish pseudonym. Foote explains, “One way to make sense of Harlands’s fraudulent marketing of identity is to think of him as one of the first people to see and act on the idea that identity is not a social category or an interior experience but a commodity valued and exchanged in the marketplace” (137).  Finally, even Marsha Orgeron’s discussion of  “Jack London and the Motion Picture Industry” in early twentieth century New York seems to have a post-colonial spin, discussing how a film based on the author’s trips to the “exotic” South Sea islands depicted “the unfamiliar rituals of the ‘noncivilized’ world” (91). In short, by the early 2000’s, the content and focus of this journal seems to have become much more post-structuralist and post-colonial.

            Moving ahead to the March 2005 edition, almost every article now seems focused, either partly or primarily, around groups who would once have hardly or never been published on in this journal. Margo Crawford’s “Erasing the Commas: RaceGenderClassSexualityReligion [sic]”, Riche Richardson’s discussion of “The Geography of Black Masculinity,” Victoria Olwell’s analysis of “Women’s Genius and Eccentric Politics,” as well as articles touching upon issues including “Narrative Authority [and] Rape Rhetoric,” “Sentiment and Slavery,” and “The Labors of Femininity.”[7] The same pretty much holds true for the March 2008 edition, whose topics and themes include the argument that in one of her novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe “criticizes the value of emotion” to generate “moral change,” instead “focus[ing] on the more socially active elements of political participation” (from the abstract); Mike Chasar’s “The Sounds of Black Laughter and the Harlem Renaissance” including Claude McKay and Langston Hughes; Alissa Karl’s “Modernism’s Risky Business [as it relates to] American Consumer Capitalism”; and other articles touching upon “Hybridity [and] Identity among gay Mexican-American men as well as “Early American Women Critics.”[8] Evident in these recent editions is clearly a more multi-cultural interest that seeks to re-examine those who have been marginalized in America’s history—literary and otherwise.

Works Cited

Cargill, Oscar. “Henry James’s ‘Moral Policeman’: William Dean Howells.” American Literature. 29.4 (Jan. 1958): 371-398. JSTOR. Web. 10 Sept. 2010.

Clay, Edward M. “The ‘Dominating’ Symbol in Hawthorne’s Last Phase.” American Literature. 39.4 (Jan. 1968): 506-516. JSTOR. Web. 13 Sept. 2010.

Cook, Richard M. “Evolving the Inscrutable: The Grotesque in Melville’s Fiction.” American Literature. 49.4 (Jan. 1978): 544-559. JSTOR. Web. 17 Sept. 2010.

Crawford, Margo. “Erasing the Commas: Race, Gender, Class, Sexuality, Religion.” American Literature. 77.1 (Mar. 2005): 1-5. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.

Dean, Janet. “Nameless Outrages: Narrative Authority, Rape Rhetoric, and the Dakota Conflict of 1862.” American Literature. 77.1 (Mar 2005): 93-122. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.

Edmunds, Susan. “The Race Question and the ‘Question of the Home’: Revisiting the Lynching Plot in Jean Toomer’s Cane.” American Literature. 75.1 (Mar. 2003): 141-169. JSTOR. Web. 18 Sept. 2010.

Foote, Stephanie. “Ethnic Plotting: Henry Harland and the Jewish Writer.” American Literature. 75.1 (Mar. 2003): 119-141. JSTOR. Web. 18 Sept. 2010.

Gullason, Thomas A. “The Cranes at Pennington Seminary.” American Literature. 39.4 (Jan. 1968): 530-541. JSTOR. 17 Sept. 2010.

Karl, Alissa. “Modernism’s Risky Business: Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and American Consumer Capitalism.” American Literature. 80.1 (Mar 2008): 83-109. JSTOR. Web. 19 Sept. 2010.

Kern, Robert. “Frost and Modernism.” American Literature. 60.1 (Mar. 1988): 1-16. JSTOR. Web. 17 Sept. 2010.

Labrie, Ross. “Henry James’s Idea of Consciousness.” American Literature. 39.4 (Jan. 1968): 517-529. JSTOR. 17 Sept. 2010.

Luciano, Dana. “’Perverse Nature’: Edgar Huntly and the Novel’s Reproductive Disorders.” American Literature. 70.1 (Mar. 1998): 1-28. JSTOR. Web. 16 Sept. 2010.

Mays, Milton A. “Henry James, or, The Beast in the Palace of Art.” American Literature. 39.4 (Jan. 1968): 467-487. JSTOR. 18 Sept. 2010.

Morris, Timothy. “The Development of Dickinson’s Style.” American Literature. 60.1 (Mar. 1988): 26-41. JSTOR. Web. 17 Sept. 2010.

Nabers, Deak. “Victory of ‘Law’: Melville and Reconstruction.” American Literature. 75.1 (Mar. 2003): 1-30. JSTOR. Web. 19 Sept. 2010.

Oliver, Lawrence J. “Writing from the Right during the ‘Red Decade’: Thomas Dixon’s Attack

on W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson in The Flaming Sword.” American Literature. 70.1 (Mar. 1998): 131-152. JSTOR. Web. 17 Sept. 2010.

Olwell, Victoria. “’It Spoke Itself’: Women’s Genius and Eccentric Politics.” American Literature. 77.1 (Mar 2005): 33-63. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.

Orgeron, Marsha. “Jack London and the Motion Picture Industry.” American Literature. 77.1 (Mar 2005): 93-122. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.

Perez-Torres, Rafael. “Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice.” American Literature. 70.1 (Mar. 1998): 153-176. JSTOR. Web. 18 Sept. 2010.

Richardson, Riche. “Charles Fuller’s Southern Specter and Geography of Black Masculinity.” American Literature. 77.1 (Mar 2005): 7-32. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.

Romines, Ann. “After the Christmas Tree: Willa Cather and Domestic Ritual.” American Literature. 60.1 (Mar. 1988): 61-82. JSTOR. Web. 16 Sept. 2010.

Roth, George G. “American Theory of Satire: 1790-1820.” American Literature. 29.4 (Jan. 1958): 399-407. JSTOR. Web. 09 Sept. 2010.

Sofer, Naomi Z. “’Carry[ing] a Yankee Girl to Glory’: Redefining Female Authorship in the Postbellum United States.” American Literature. 75.1 (Mar. 2003): 31-60. JSTOR. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.

Stewart, George M. and Backus, Joseph M. “’Each in Its Ordered Place’: Structure and Narrative in ‘Benjy’s Section’ of The Sound and the Fury.” American Literature. 29.4 (Jan. 1958): 440-456. JSTOR. Web. 13 Sept. 2010.

           

           

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[1] I read select articles and perused the others from Jan. or March 1958, ‘68, ‘78, ’88 and ’98 as well as Jan. or March 2003, 2005 and 2008.

[2] Respectively, by Perez-Torres, Rafael; and Luciano, Dana. Amer. Lit. Mar. 1998 (70.1). Full MLA citations are available on my Works Cited page.

[3] The Cather article, as later footnote acknowledges, is in some sense concerned with gender, though not in the radical spirit that later articles will be; the Dickinson article seems highly formalist and not particularly interested in the author’s gender.  As such, I feel comfortable calling the ’88 edition rather traditional for its time.

[4] I say this, I realize, at the risk of seeming to impose a false dichotomy, a constructed “before” and “after” in which Amer. Lit. has a clearly definable turning point with characterizable content in the two time periods. This might be an oversimplification that casts previous decades of scholarship in too shallow or primitive a light. As such, let me offer the disclaimer that earlier, pre-80’s and 90’s editions sometimes boasted scholarship that, in this student’s opinion at least, would hold up very well even in today’s (largely) theory-driven, post-structuralist and post-modernist climate of literary scholarship. A particularly good example of this, on which more to come, is Ross Labrie’s article on “Henry James’s Idea of Consciousness,” from the Jan. ’68 edition.

[5] Full disclosure: I had suspected this to be a notable anachronism of the article, but sought the backing of this interpretation by someone more familiar with Melville, who verified for me that the article would come off as suspiciously apolitical and un-racial if published today.  Being not familiar with much of Melville’s work (I’ve only read some of his short stories), I consulted a colleague who did her MA thesis on Melville; she offered, after skimming the article under discussion here, some of the ideas that I present above. She referred to the article’s non-mention of race/ethnicity and the European/non-European binary as an “elephant in the room” by modern standards; she asserted that, from the vast amount of contemporary Melville criticism she has read, this article would not work nowadays without significantly altering its content to adopt a post-colonial angle. She, for one, finds it obvious that many “grotesque” Others in Melville’s work are racialized and echo rather Conradian (Conrad-esque?) themes.

[6] Though it might be worth mentioning that Anne Romines’s article from the 1988 edition, on “Willa Cather and Domestic Ritual,” does have a gender focus, not only in that it obviously concerns a woman writer, but also in that it explores how domestic rituals normally performed or facilitated by women function in significant ways in the writer’s work.

[7] See Works Cited page.

[8] See WC.

Bibliographic Essay Draft

Andrew McCormick

ENGL 701/Graduate Methodology

Prof. Richter

1 Nov. 2010

Bibliographic Essay Draft

            A look at the last couple of decades of scholarship strongly suggests that there is much interest in re-examining political works of 1930’s Depression fiction. At least since the 1990’s, many critics have prompted a re-evaluation of this period’s novels—both better known and relatively obscure—with the goal of challenging the traditional assumption that most politically driven 1930’s fiction was a step backwards, victim of its own obtuse and reductionist political agendas for which sophisticated literature is not the proper outlet. Even across literary theory’s differing epistemological notions of selfhood and language which often stand to generate divergent and incompatible readings among liberal humanist versus poststructuralist critics, we can find notable consensus among recent critics that much 1930’s political-leaning fiction and nonfiction does, upon closer examination, exhibit more sophistication, more nuance, and more of a departure from straightforward realism than had been previously granted (Cf Kazin xiii; Dickstein 36, 47; Solomon 799-800).           

To offer a few key examples of recent critics who have sought to complicate our picture of 30’s fiction, we might begin by briefly considering Alfred Kazin’s 1991 introduction to Henry Roth’s 1934 novel Call It Sleep, in which Kazin succinctly asserts that Roth’s famous novel is more akin to Joyce’s Ulysses than to Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (xiii). Kazin later adds, “Call It Sleep is not a naturalistic novel, one in which character is shaped by environment” (xiii). This reading—one, as we will see, in which Kazin is not alone—certainly problematizes any claims that Roth’s novel is a straightforward proletarian one. 

Much more recently, in his 2009 work Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, Morris Dickstein similarly argues of Henry Roth and a handful of his contemporaries that

their work shows us strikingly different ways to bring marginal lives into the public consciousness…but these writers are not muckrakers or social activists…their writing tended to be more personal or more ironic, more attuned to psychology or more comically irrepressible. (36)

Dickstein later couches his defense of Roth in a clearly anti-poststructuralist argument, insisting that Roth got his influence from the “first generation modernists who taught him to use language to convey the shape and rhythm of individual awareness” which “enabled him to keep his characters from being reduced to stereotypes of the poor” (47); Dickstein makes it quite clear that such an understanding of Roth stands in direct opposition to the post-structuralist argument that “selfhood is little more than an illusion sustained by language” (47).  Dickstein adds to the roster of innovative 30’s writers whose portrayal of the poor went beyond the narrow limits of realism and naturalism Nathaniel West, Daniel Fuchs and James Agee, among others (36).

Dickstein’s analyses of Roth, Gold and other writers certainly attest to the contemporary trend of re-considering oft-dismissed or mis-categorized works of the Depression. But in my mind, William Solomon’s 1996 article “Politics and Rhetoric in the Novel in the 1930’s” poses an even more radical urge to re-assess Depression fiction. As representative examples of the argument that some leftist 30’s novels are more sophisticated and rhetorically layered than critics had realized, Solomon offers for analysis some rather unmistakably left-leaning, proletarian works, including books by Tom Kromer and Edward Dahlberg. Solomon argues that in these kinds of leftist thirties books can be encountered “an at times extreme skepticism towards the referential reliability of realist modes of narration,” echoing Kazin’s and Dickstein’s points (800).

            While these and other critics argue for a revised understanding of leftist 1930’s writing, characterizing much of it as more modernist than realist or naturalist, I intend to build off of their ideas but revise them for a postmodern reconsideration that might fall roughly in line with the work T.V. Reed has done on Agee’s and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I hope to add to the theory-informed discourse on 1930’s political prose, positing that some of these works can be shown to exhibit rhetorical tendencies that are even more appropriately called proto-postmodern. I approach this tentative thesis under the influence of Reed’s “Unimagined Existence and the Fiction of the Real: Postmodernist Realism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Reed’s argument is that Agee’s prose and Evans’s photographs exhibit a kind of “postmodernist realism, a self-conscious, ironic, politically engaged mode of writing” which “employs the self-reflexive, realism-disrupting techniques of modernism and postmodernism but places these techniques in tension with realist claims to represent and intervene in political life.” Reed speaks of an “epistemological problematic” reminiscent of postmodernism which can be seen in Agee’s and Evans’s work (157). So I approach this project with the hope that similar postmodern elements can be found in the better-known and lesser-known leftist works of the 30’s discussed above.

            Though these writers—Reed on the one hand and Kazin et al on the other—clearly employ different theoretical lenses, I am interested in a specific point of convergence: their interest in the portrayal of the disenfranchised, a subject that always poses a problematic need to avoid over-simplification yet illustrate the physical and spiritual impoverishment that stems from being poor and marginalized. Dickstein, as noted above, speaks of a handful of politically concerned Depression writers, including Roth, Agee and West, whose enduring contribution, he says, is an insistence on presenting the poor through the often “ironic,” typically subjective, inner-consciousness driven worldview which prevented them from being “reduced to stereotypes,” in which sense these authors are not straightforward realists or mere proletarian muckrakers (47). As explained earlier, for Dickstein this reading is couched in the liberal-humanist side of the theoretical divide now so pervasive in literary scholarship; clearly, Reed’s interest in “postmodernist realism” in Agee’s and Evans’s work owes allegiance to the opposite side of the theory spectrum. My task, then, will be to examine the implications of select 30’s writers’ portrayal of the impoverished and marginalized through a more postmodern lens, considering where and with what implications we might find postmodern tropes or tenets—the questioning of meta-narratives, the insistence on victories being contingent and local, and the skepticism of any essentialist view of the human being[1]. I expect that such a reading will be not dissimilar to but not without some key differences from Reed’s work on Agee and Evans.

Works Cited/Bibliography           

Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. (1939). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.

Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. New York: Norton, 2009. Print.

Kazin, Alfred. “Introduction.” Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934). New York: Picador, 1991. Print.

Klages, Mary. Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum Books, 2007. Print.

Reed, T.V. “Unimagined Existence and the Fiction of the Real: Postmodernist Realism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Representations. No. 24 (1988): 156-176. JSTOR. Web. 24 Sept. 2010.

Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. (1934). New York: Picador, 1991. Print.

Solomon, William. “Politics and Rhetoric in the Novel in the 1930’s.” American Literature. 68.4 (1996): 799-818. JSTOR. 22 Oct. 2010. Web.

           

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[1] Klages 166-169.

assignment 5

Andrew McCormick

ENGL 701/Graduate Methodology

Prof. Richter

25 Oct. 2010

Assignment 5: Critical Voice--

Dickstein and Solomon on 30’s fiction and political matters

Part One

The two readings I have chosen for this assignment are: a chapter from Morris Dickstein’s recent book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (chapter two: “The Tenement and the World: Immigrant Lives”); and an American Literature article by William Solomon (1996), “Politics and Rhetoric in the Novel in the 1930’s.”

From the chapter in Dickstein’s book, several important names/works that emerge are: Alfred Kazin, whose introduction to Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep I have read and referred to in previous assignments, and whose book Starting out in the Thirties, as well as other works, I intend to check out in light of Dickstein’s citation in the chapter’s footnotes; Michael Harrington (a former Queens College political science professor), whose 1963 book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which Dickstein discusses in the context of how mainstream American ideology has often, outside of major recessions, tended to forget about or ignore poverty, looks like it may give some useful historical context regarding ideology as well as statistics about poverty during and after the Great Depression; and, finally, a familiar name, Allen Guttmann, whose article “Think Back on the Thirties” I have already put on my tentative bibliography, and whose book The Jewish Writer in America (1971) Dickstein discusses in relation to Mike Gold and Henry Roth, both of whom are likely to be major parts of my project, especially concerning the differences between more overtly political writing (“proletarian” novels) versus less political work which is more commonly perceived as drawing its primary influence from modernism like Joyce, Eliot, Proust, etc. (Dickstein 15-90; Kazin xii-xvi, in the introduction to Roth’s Call It Sleep). So Guttmann’s book and perhaps some of his other works are probably worth investigating.

From Solomon’s article, some books cited in the notes section seem promising, particularly in their relative recentness: Walter Kalaidjian’s 1993 book American Culture between the Wars: Revolutionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique; Michael Staub’s 1994 Voices of Persuasion: Politics of Representation in 1930’s America; also potentially interesting to look for is a not-so-recent but potentially useful-sounding article by Marcus Klein, “The Roots of Radicals.” And, since Solomon opens up his article by building directly off of her work, I intend to examine works, including the one listed, by Paula Rabinowitz. (Full MLA citations for all the potential sources from Dickstein’s chapter and Solomon’s article can be found at the end of this assignment).

Part Two

Re-reading the second chapter of Dickstein’s book has allowed me to really see how the author is positioning himself in relation to a major question about 30’s fiction, especially its more political side: whether critics have largely simplified and falsely labeled some works in 1930’s political fiction as lacking in nuance and sophistication (and, by rather direct implication, in literary or artistic merit). Dickstein’s discussion of Mike Gold’s oft-labeled proletarian novel Jews without Money echoes a now familiar position about some of the fiction of the time (one shared, as I will discuss shortly, by William Solomon in his 1996 article), taking the position that some works of the time which have been traditionally criticized as too left-leaning and thus unliterary actually deserve more praise for their sophistication and layered literary content—in other words, there’s more than meets the eye to many 30’s works with political undertones. In the task of arguing for a defense of the literary merit of Gold’s novel and for a revised conceptualization of this work as not, strictly speaking, a proletarian novel like the “strike novels” of the time, Dickstein employs that classic they say/I say trope[1], explaining, 

Some would say that Gold’s work is fatally damaged by the ethical morass into which this blind faith led him; most of it is. But until the last page, Gold was able to keep outright politics and ideology out of Jews without Money. He turned his recollections into grimly effective vignettes without belaboring their message. To an unusual extent for a Communist writer, he let the material speak for itself. (22)

            This passage seems to be a good example of a critical voice; Dickstein acknowledges the partial validity of opposing interpretations, noting the basis for some of their criticisms of this particular writer in question, but then decidedly challenges the notion that Gold’s writing, namely one of his better-known novels, is without merit or complexity. Similar, later examples of this kind of critical voice also pertain to Gold’s novel. In one, Dickstein argues,

Even if we grant, as few critics have done, that Gold created a powerful style all of his own, a style sharply different from documentary naturalism or socialist realism, this doesn’t explain why Jews without Money…should become a seminal text of the Depression years. Though the book was completed by the end of 1928, well before the [Stock Market] Crash, its appearance early in 1930 helped place poverty, ethnicity and human misery on the cultural agenda, just as the depression was putting them of the political agenda. (24)

            Adding to the legitimacy of his critical voice here, Dickstein supplements his point with the words of another author shortly after this. He explains that the “future,” the new time, that is, which America was facing (one distinctly and frighteningly different from its recent past, one Henry James was startled by when he returned home after twenty years in Europe to see New York’s tremendous diversity and class disparities) “had arrived.” To further this assertion, Dickstein refers to another critic, adding, “and, as the critic Marcus Klein added in Foreigners, cultural outsiders like Gold were better equipped to write about [this future] than the sheltered scions of New York or New England gentility” (24). Dickstein then punctuates and closes out the paragraph with his culminating point, that “the ghetto of 1900 [of Henry Roth’s and Mike Gold’s childhood experiences turned fiction]…suddenly spoke volumes to the acute social distress of 1930” (24).

            But Dickstein’s most notable use of a critical, scholarly voice in this chapter can be found, in my opinion, toward the chapter’s end. It is here that he enters rather explicitly—and boldly—into a debate that is entirely in the high-stakes realm of theory, couching his rich reading of Henry Roth’s work smack in the middle of the rather pervasive rift between liberal-humanist, pre-post-structural critics and post-structural ones; in so doing, Dickstein identifies which side he occupies of the rather gaping ideological and philosophical chasm running through the world of literary scholarship since the 1960’s. Dickstein posits a compelling, anti-post-structuralist position (a liberal-humanist one, that is) in his final words on Roth’s novel Call It Sleep, in a paragraph worth quoting in its entirety here:

It’s hardly possible to do full justice to the role language plays in Call It Sleep. Like the modified stream of consciousness Roth uses in the narration, the characters’ language is subjective in the ways it expresses the complexity of their lives. Though poststructuralist literary theorists have argued that language is conventional and duplicitous, an arbitrary set of signifiers, and that selfhood is little more than an illusion sustained by language, Roth’s mentors [Proust, Joyce, Eliot and other modernists, as Dickstein has discussed earlier in the chapter] were the first generation modernists who taught him to use language to convey the shape and rhythm of individual awareness. This enabled him to keep his characters from being reduced to stereotypes of the poor, from being turned into social data, which is what some thirties writers, turning back to naturalism, had begun to do. (47)

            The above seems like an excellent case study in rhetorical moves that both put forth an original thesis while entering into wide, long-enduring discourses from the world of literary theory that rather pervade and perhaps constrain the discipline. He identifies and acutely sums up what poststructuralism has claimed, for better or worse, and offers a crisp alternative to it. And in the process, he feeds one of the book’s major arguments—that much of the allegedly junior-ish work of the time period was more literary, more clever, more at discourse with other movements, philosophies and debates, than people have traditionally acknowledged. Shortly thereafter, Dickstein closes out the chapter, whose primary raison d’être has been to examine oft-simplified and mis-labeled as proletarian or ultra-leftist works in a finer light, couching them in more of a modernist tradition, by asserting that Roth’s celebrated novel deserves its praise because “unfashionably, he makes his language a vehicle of self-analysis, almost a Freudian case-study.” He adds that the novel “insists that [social meaning] can be approached only by way of the individual experience,” and that in so doing, “Roth gave the proletarian novel its richest and most haunting text” (49).

            In a 1996 article with very similar motivations and interests as Dickstein’s recent book, William Solomon also takes issue with the ways in which novels of the 1930’s had often, until fairly recently, been characterized (wrongfully) as belonging to a “period without interest, a time in which most American novelists other than Faulkner regressed, unable to pick up where their more modernist precursors left off” (Solomon 799). Referring to another critic, Paula Rabinowitz, who used the proletarian novel Marching! Marching! to argue that even overtly political, formulaic leftist books “resisted the ideological closure of the realist text,”[2] Solomon then joins this side of the debate, arguing,

If Rabinowitz is correct, and I think she is, it follows that the place of this decade in the history of the American novel is more complicated than past scholarship has acknowledged. For if we accept that even this novel—one often used to epitomize what went wrong with the novel in the thirties—may be interpreted as an attempt to go “beyond” realism, we begin to suspect that past characterizations of the period as extremely naïve with respect to literary representation may be inadequate. (799)

            It seems more than safe to consider the above a sophisticated rhetorical move in which the writer springboards off of an existing argument to arrive at his thesis, which he presents as follows:

I am convinced that in the thirties an entirely different way of looking at the relationship between politics and literature was struggling to emerge, and that the failure of past critics to acknowledge this fact has obscured valuable ideas and precise observations. My contribution to the current collective critical enterprise will be to demonstrate the way in which a few leftist novelists in the thirties made rhetoric—as defined below—the ground of their innovations into the political. (800)

            Solomon then goes on to discuss the three pertinent novels referred to above: Edward Dahlberg’s From Flushing to Cavalry (1932), Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (1935), and a particular section of John Dos Passos’s 1919 of the USA Trilogy, “The Body of an American.” I won’t go into detail at this time about the many relevant passages illustrating Solomon’s critical voice in his analysis of these three works, but suffice it so say that the article has been highly illuminating in regards to the debates surrounding 30’s political works; moreover, it is worth noting that Solomon’s argument coincides with what are at this point familiar positions taken by other critics (Dickstein, Kazin, and others), making it a valuable resource.

Full MLA Citations

(of sources I’ve been pointed towards from the two above-discussed readings)

Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. New York: Norton, 2009. Print.

Guttmann, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971.

Harrington, Michael. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.

Kalaidjian, Walter. American Culture between the Wars: Revolutionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993.

Kazin, Alfred. Starting Out in the Thirties. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1965.

___________, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. (1942). Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956.

Rabinowitz, Paula. Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Solomon, William. “Politics and Rhetoric in the Novel in the 1930’s.” American Literature. 68.4 (Dec. 1996): 799-818. JSTOR. 22 Oct. 2010. Web.

Staub, Michael. Voices of Persuasion: Politics of Representation in 1930’s America. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994.

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[1] Of course, now the name of a very successful composition and research textbook by Gerald Graff et al: “They Say, I Say”: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. New York: Norton, 2009. I employ the phrase with this in mind.

[2] Rabinowitz, Paula. Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991. The words quoted above are Rabinowitz’s, quoted by Solomon, p. 799. All other MLA citations for relevant works from Dickstein and Solomon are at the end.

assignment 4

Andrew McCormick

ENGL 701: Graduate Methodology

Prof. Richter

18 October 2010

Assignment 4 (“Overwhelming Question”)

My Question(s)

            Firstly, can seeds of what many critics nowadays think of as postmodernism (as an artistic and especially as a literary lens) be encountered in different works of literature, namely fiction, of the Great Depression? Can we, now several decades into a time in which the “postmodern” is rather a given, in retrospective find elements of it in some of the fiction that emerged from this rather dire chapter of U.S. history, the 1930’s? Secondly, stemming from this, if indeed we can talk about elements of the proto-postmodern in some works of this time period, are we primarily limited to certain kinds of depression-era fiction? That is, would the elements of an early, pre-emergent or emerging postmodernism be primarily, or for that matter only, encountered in a particular corner or corners of the fiction that emerged from the American 1930’s? Would this phenomenon be limited to or more common to works written, say, in the first-person? The third-person? Would it be limited to certain writers? To a particular time within the 1930’s? To certain subjects? Also related to the first, originally posed question (as to whether we can find seeds of the postmodern in 30’s depression literature), what would be the function(s) of this emerging, early postmodernism in relation to the political ideologies and discourses of the time? In particular, how might it operate in the portrayal of some of the especially impoverished or disenfranchised that were the subject of depression writers? Then, circling back to broader, philosophically oriented literary and cultural questions, does the presence of the postmodern in this time period and the aforementioned themes in question necessarily stand to undermine politically charged messages or readings? Can one who has claimed to have identified and explored seeds of postmodernism in 1930’s depression-era fiction that portrays the disenfranchised, still stand on firm ground in asserting that there are political messages in the work? Or has one negated this possibility by positing the presence of postmodern tropes in the works in question? Or, put more simply, what are the politico-ideological implications of an early, emerging/proto-postmodernism in depression fiction as we retrospectively view it today?

           

From Whence It Came

My interest in what would become these interrelated questions originated, as far as I can tell, with an examination of a 30’s short story by William Saroyan that I wrote a paper on a year or so ago. The criticism I read on the story, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” seemed preoccupied, among other things, with just how to classify the author. One critic argued that Saroyan was a “Romantic Existentialist,”[1] another viewed his work as fundamentally more naturalistic than modernist, and others considered him a late modernist stretching the edges of the modernist envelope, so to speak. One particular critic, the most recently published I was able to find at the time, reflected back on Saroyan’s work as belonging to that bridge, or that “ critical point of least convenience between the first wave of Modernism […] and that new wave of Postmodernism—Kerouac, most obviously—that he is shown to have influenced” (Locklin NP). This critic goes on to point out that Saroyan can be seen as “our contemporary” (in the 1990’s, the time the critic was writing) given his way of “eras[ing] boundaries.”

This particular encounter with disputes about Saroyan prompted me to write that essay on a postmodern reading of the short story (“The Daring Young Man…”). Exploring theoretical readings and introduction-to-theory type books on postmodernism, I became more interested in the postmodern lens, especially as it stands to deny a wholeness of identity or essence, and to deny or complicate meta-narratives, as well as to embrace rather than flee from the identity-blurring madness that is the modern condition (as opposed to modernism, which some critics I have read argue to be characterized by a nostalgia for pre-modernism times, where things were, people like to think, more neatly lined up).[2]

            These were the seeds of my interest in the emergence of the proto-postmodern in earlier to mid-twentieth century literature (namely fiction), particularly that of the depression-era. Then, when I began searching databases this semester for publications on thirties, depression-era literature and modernism/postmodernism, the pivotal piece of scholarship I came across, which has thus far shaped, validated and given impetus to this interest, was T.V. Reed’s article arguing for the presence of “Postmodern Realism” in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s interdisciplinary book on poor southern farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. As I discussed in the previous two assignments, Reed argues that although the term or concept of the postmodern, as we know it, was obviously not yet in usage in the 1930’s, much of what we now acknowledge as postmodern is undoubtedly at play in Agee’s prose and Evans’s photographs.

So this article on Agee and Evans has definitely put me on my current path, which I have continued down by reading more about postmodernism itself. Along the way so far, I have consulted the two intro to theory books footnoted below, articles from Steven Connor’s Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, and, finally, begun putting together a tentative list of some novels of the 1930’s (which I am beginning to tackle now). As mentioned, this currently includes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, some more of Saroyan’s 1930’s work, and perhaps some Steinbeck. I will also be reading Agee and Evans at some point, hopefully soon. 

           

Where I See It Going

Some issues I expect to see arise include the need to narrow down the type of 1930’s writers of fiction and depression era books, maybe developing as I go along some parameters—type of narrator, specifically, or kinds of people portrayed, or setting, maybe urban vs. rural, etc. (some of this I’ve already foreshadowed in my opening paragraph outlining my interrelated questions). As is, I have a very tentative and frankly rather eclectic grouping; Roth’s novel seems, as Alfred Kazin points out in the book’s introduction, very modernist, stream-of-consciousness driven in some places, centered around the child’s perception of the outside world rather than offering a free-standing and independent world outside which he is subject to, and, in turn, perhaps having some affinities with Joyce’s Ulysses[3]. Agee and Evans, from what I have read of it in Reed’s article and from the bits I have skimmed so far, seems a much different kind of book from Roth’s and my other tentative titles in several ways, the least of which is that it is openly and self-consciously interdisciplinary (or discipline and genre eluding, as per Reed). Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, though Dickstein’s discussion of it in Dancing in the Dark and the bits I’ve skimmed do give me the impression that it is a generally appropriate candidate to explore my theme of interest, sounds like it differs in some perhaps major ways from Roth and Agee/Evans. This might include its first person, omniscient narrator, and more compellingly, what Dickstein describes as a kind of ironic, black humor that works with cultural stereotypes, moving beyond them in subtle ways (96-99). This too might very well be read as a kind of emerging postmodernism, but likely a very different kind than what Roth’s young protagonist does in Call It Sleep. So the question I find myself facing early on is, will I need to gradually narrow it down to a few books that share, in addition to the desire to portray the impoverished, some common rhetorical grounds like type of narrator, setting, even tone? I think I likely will.

            On the other hand, I am definitely sensing some nice parallels in style and content between Roth and Saroyan, leading me to believe that these two writers will remain parts of this gradually developing project. Perhaps I will be starting with Roth’s Call It Sleep and some of Saroyan’s works that are similar in a few key ways to Roth, and looking for other 30’s works that have these similar kinds of traits.

            I am, at any rate, noticing that a flaw in my approach has been to front the theory and criticism aspect of the research and do the reading of the fiction itself later; I should probably ease off on the theoretical research (research about the theory which will inform the project) for a while and just plow into the novels and stories I might like to use (since I do know my time period, themes and what related theory I am interested in bringing in), and later on down the road, once I’ve selected and found patterns in some works of fiction, then return to the theory/criticism aspect.

           

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[1] Thelma Shinn; “William Saroyan: Romantic Existentialist.”

[2] Mary Klages in Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed; also Peter Barry in Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.

[3] Kazin, xii-xiv; introduction to: Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep (1934). New York: Picador, 1991. Print.