Mr. Ambivalent: Jonathan Franzen and the Masculinization of the Middlebrow

Abstract

ABSTRACT No contemporary author has spent as much time and energy theorizing the literary field than Jonathan Franzen, and no author has generated as much controversy over that theorizing. That controversy erupted most fully when Franzen responded so ambivalently to the selection of The Corrections for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. In this essay, I argue that Franzen is engaged in a reconstruction of the middlebrow, a masculinization of this historically feminized cultural formation. Situating Franzen’s essays in relation both to modernist debates about the middlebrow and more recent conversations about the rapidly changing shape of popular literary culture, I argue that both gender and genre are at the center of Franzen’s contradictory claims for his literary practice and his efforts to reimagine the middlebrow as a more congenial space for white male authors. In his novels, this ambivalence gets deflected onto interpersonal conflicts between men and women and onto fantasies of men’s disempowerment at the hands of women. We can see this in The Corrections, which reveals a desire to reclaim the middlebrow for an emotionally saturated, but still masculine, literary practice.