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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