Theodore Dreiser Research Articles

EXPLORATION OF IRONY OF DESIRES THROUGH THE LENS OF PSYCHOLOGY AND MORALITY IN THEODORE DREISER’S NOVEL “SISTER CARRIE

This article delves into the intricate dynamics of human emotions, desires, and ambitions within Theodore Dreiser’s novel “Sister Carrie”. It explores the profound psychological transformations and moral dilemmas experienced by the characters. Through meticulous analysis of dialogue excerpts, it unveils the complexities of their inner worlds and the consequences of their choices. By dissecting the characters' aspirations and ethical struggles, it provides fresh perspectives on their development and the moral inquiries embedded in the narrative. Ultimately, the article offers profound insights into the interplay of personal ambition, societal expectations, and moral integrity within the novel's rich tapestry of human experience.

Reconstructing the Family Unit: A Study of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

The family unit is the smallest but most important unit of the society. When the families are strong and united, the entire nation will definitely be strong and prosperous. If the families are weak or fragile, the entire society will obviously be fragilised. We set out in this study to probe into the American family unit as depicted in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and F. Scot Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. This paper is premised on the hypothetical contention that the American family unit as depicted in the novels under study, has significantly disintegrated, and is in dire need of reconstruction. Individual and Ego Psychological theories constitute the theoretical framework for this paper. Looking through the theoretical lens of Adler’s Individual Psychology and Erikson’s Ego Psychology, one can posit that, both novelists suggest in their novels under study a moral and spiritual rearmament as a condition sine qua non for the reconstruction of the American family unit.

Commemorative Impulses in the “Heart of America”: Kansas City, the Great War, and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy

Commemorative Impulses in the “Heart of America”: Kansas City, the Great War, and Theodore Dreiser’s <i>An American Tragedy</i>

Weakness of power: Masculinity at odds in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie

Age, gender, and race (among many), are often used as sources of power in human societies to lord it over the weaker ones. Two decades before women got the right to vote in the U.S., Theodore Dreiser published Sister Carrie, portraying an 18-year-old girl dissatisfied with county life, who travels to the city for better life. The journey and the stay met with masculinity showcased by a sex-hungry Drouet and a fragmented Hurstwood. Lack of responsibility as a male quickly plunges this figure into a journey that gradually weakens him deprives him of belongings, and finally offers him suicide. Informed by psychoanalytical theory, this paper describes Sister Carrie in terms of weakness of power (male over female) which turns the powerful into weak and the weak into powerful.

«Писатель-мещанин, ноющий в болоте»: первое знакомство советского читателя с Э. Хемингуэем

The paper examines early Soviet reception of Ernest Hemingway's works. The research is based on the readers’ letters to Goslitizdat (State Publishing House) from the funds of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI). A small collection of letters (1935–1936) shows readers’ reaction to the first Hemingway’s Soviet book editions: a short story collection Death in the Afternoon (1934) and Fiesta (1935). The readers unanimously condemn Hemingway for his “decadent” prose and Goslitizdat for publishing such “absurd” and “harmful” books. The only exception is a short positive review of the novel A Farewell to Arms (1936) sent to Goslitizdat in 1937. To uncover the reasons for the negative readers’ reception one should turn to the literary criticism of the 1934–1935, especially the essays by Ivan Kashkin who introduced the new author to the Soviet reading audience. A comparative analysis of readers’ feedback and critical discourse shows that the ambivalent and even contradictory image of the writer created by the critics made the readers think of Hemingway’s works as “decadent”, “bourgeois” and alien to Soviet people. Another reason was the innovative nature of Hemingway’s modernist prose which seemed obscure, confusing and unintelligible; the Soviet reader obviously preferred “clarity” and “simplicity” of Erskine Caldwell’s or Theodore Dreiser’s realistic writings. The situation changed by the 1937, when Hemingway was praised by both Soviet critics and readers as an anti-fascist writer, a heroic defender of the Spanish Republic.

Marital Quality in Financial Anxiety: A Critical View of Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier

This article is an attempt to explore the extreme love for money that disturbs the feelings and emotional attachments of the protagonist in Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier. The desire of Frank Cowperwood for materialistic objects without aesthetic sense covers the whole events of the plot. The violation of religious values, social ethics and norms to become part of the upper class. He always remained busy in money making and business and several times changed houses to well-furnished and decorated houses to show his family a very prosperous and upper-class family. He shifted his family because he did not feel easy with those who were financially weak; they considered themselves as members of the upper class. Frank Cowperwood sacrificed relations; he married Lillian for money, but later on, he got interested in Aileen for money and sacrificed relations with Lillian for Aileen and Money. The whole novel is revolved around the concept of materialism. Values are ignored, Relationships are sacrificed, and the weak position of religion is only to gain financial success. Frank Cowperwood gained financial power, though he violated all social and religious values. The qualitative approach is applied in textual analysis with a Marxist lens for an oriented conclusion. This research is beneficial for literary people to explore the new dimensions of literary pieces.

Naturalism and the New Woman: Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did

Naturalism and the New Woman: Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did

19th century of realism and naturalism (Theodore Dreiser)

19th century of realism and naturalism (Theodore Dreiser)

Gold Standard

The subjects of these two books basically belonged to the same generation. Philip Rahv (1908–73) and Michael Gold (1894–1967) shared origins in the Jewish lower class, and rose to literary prominence during the Great Depression. But from the perspective of posterity, what especially links their names is the notion of “proletarian literature.” In novels and short stories, in sketches and poetry, in drama and reportage, the writers who generally accepted this label repudiated the genteel tradition that had crested in the late Victorian era. To be sure, that decorous era of belles lettres had always been contested. It had its outliers – most famously Mark Twain. The list of those who troubled the taste of the era also included, among younger writers, the barely housebroken Theodore Dreiser and Jack London.

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of Sister Carrie

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of <i>Sister Carrie</i>

«Сад расходящихся тропок»: переосмысляя Драйзера (Тропа Драйзера. Творчество писателя в современном освещении. М.: РГГУ, 2023. 206 с.)

The review focuses on the collective monograph Dreiser’s Path: A View with a Modern Lens (2023). The scholarly work reevaluates Dreiser's significance as a classic of American literature and offers a contemporary perspective on his legacy through the lens of modern methodologies such as critical race theory, postcolonial theory, gender theory, etc. The attention of prominent researchers in American literature and culture from Russia, the USA, Canada, and the UK is drawn to Dreiser's contradictory and hermetic view of society and its artistic projection. The monograph reevaluates Dreiser's creative legacy, considering both major and well-known works as well as minor forms. The researchers featured in the monograph highlight the reasons why certain laws operate in Dreiser's artistic world, align Dreiser's value system with the social norms prevailing during his time, typologize the components of Dreiser's texts, and theorize them using contemporary methodological tools. They also juxtapose Dreiser's texts with other artifacts of American culture and demonstrate the evolution of Dreiser's perception from the times of the USSR to the present day. The monograph was conceived in 2021 as a special tribute to Theodore Dreiser to mark his 150 anniversary.

АМЕРИКАНСКИЕ ПИСАТЕЛИ С ВИЗИТОМ В СССР: "ПРОСТРАНСТВО" И "ВРЕМЯ" КАК КОНСТРУИРУЮЩИЕ КАТЕГОРИИ В АМЕРИКАНСКОЙ ТРЭВЕЛ-ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ 1920-1940-Х ГГ.

In the academic field, Soviet-American relations are more often studied in the context of the Cold War, while bilateral contacts in the first half of the 20th century are much less represented. Research focuses more on formal cultural diplomacy, implemented through the organization of cultural exhibitions, film festivals and creative initiatives, rather than on visits by foreign intellectuals motivated to see the Soviet country from the inside. The article examines the plot-forming categories of “space” and “time” in the travelogue works of American writers who personally visited the USSR in the 1920–1940s. The focus of the study is the travel diaries of Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes and John Steinbeck. Each travel journal operates within its own spatial boundaries and time period within the geography of the USSR and a given chronological period of the 20th century. The key aspect of this work is the analysis of the chronotope (according to M.M. Bakhtin), which represents the interconnection of temporal and spatial relations in the narrative. Being constructed by the writer, the chronotope consists of premises, signs, symbols and ideas that bear the imprint of the time of a given period and are inextricably linked with the figure of the author of each travel diary under consideration. This approach to the analysis of the diary text makes it possible to reveal the writer’s understanding of the reality around him, which he attributes with meaning in the context of the historical and political realities of the given epoch.

Теодор Драйзер в Ленинграде. Новые материалы

Theodorе Dreiser was invited to the USSR to take part in the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. His visit to the Soviet Union that lasted over two months (November 4, 1926 — January 13, 1928) has been documented and studied quite well: Dreiser's Russian diary that he kept during his travel was published almost 30 years ago, and four years ago its Russian translation appeared. Another source is Ruth Epperson Kennell’s book Theodore Dreiser and the USSR. A First- Hand Chronicle (1969). A number of studies and scholarly publications are devoted to Dreiser’s trip; however, new materials and documents that contribute to more detailed reconstruction of Dreiser’s Russian journey still are being found in the archives. New documents from the funds of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) that highlight Dreiser’s stay in Leningrad (November 26 — December 2, 1927) are published in the Addendum to the article: a report submitted to VOKS by Sergei Trivas, officer for Anglo-American countries, who accompanied Dreiser as a guide and interpreter, and a letter of gratitude from Dreiser to Nikolai Derzhavin, VOKS representative in Leningrad.

The Tragedy of the Quaker Hero as a Reflection of the Crisis of Spiritual Life in Theodore Dreiser's novel "The Bulwark"

The subject of the research in this article is the peculiarities of the coverage of the problem of the religious crisis with the United States at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries in the work of one of the most famous realist writers, Theodore Dreiser. He depicted in detail in his works various aspects of the life of Americans of this period, including the religious aspect. The religious crisis in American society is closely connected with the destruction of the ideological ideals of the past. In the artistic heritage of Theodore Dreiser, one can single out a whole system of images, with the help of which he showed the crisis of the religious and moral component of the spiritual life of American society of this period. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the need to consider the religious aspect in the writer's creative heritage, which for various reasons often fell out of the field of view of earlier critical works. The purpose of the presented work is to study the artistic images in Theodore Dreiser's novel "The Bulwark" in a religious and moral way as a manifestation of the spiritual crisis common to Americans of that time. The following conclusions were presented during the study: 1) Theodore Dreiser is a witness to the crisis in the spiritual and moral life of the USA at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, which is one of the main themes of the writer's creative heritage; 2) This crisis is connected with the destruction of the fundamental ideological categories of American society (the "great American dream"); 3) In the novel "The Bulwark" T. Dreiser examines the moral and religious picture of American society on the example of the Quaker-Barnes family. He depicts the collapse of religious beliefs in the perception of both the older generation and the younger; 4) The beginning of the XX century was a transitional period. When the forcible imposition of religious norms became a tragedy for many young people; 5) The new age requires new forms of interaction between man and religion.

“Claims to Be an Author”: Halldór Laxness’s American Years

ABSTRACT Although the Icelandic author Halldór Laxness frequently highlighted his debt to American literature and spent several formative years in the United States during the 1920s, few Americanists have investigated his literary and political relationship with the United States. This essay delineates Laxness’s American years through archival sources by mapping his first failed venture to Ellis Island in 1922 through boat records and by tracking his second trip, from 1927 to 1929, through letters, newspapers, and other documents, including a film pitch written in English. Laxness’s biographical experiences in the United States during the 1920s shed light on immigration policy and illuminate some of the struggles that novelists in Hollywood faced while attempting to navigate a cinematic marketplace. His unsuccessful film pitch became the basis for Salka Valka, an epic novel influenced by American writers, most notably, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis.

Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan ed. by Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega

Reviewed by: Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan ed. by Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega Alison Mandaville Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan Ed. Zaure Batayeva & Shelley Fairweather-Vega Trans. Zaure Batayeva & Shelley Fairweather-Vega. New York. Gaudy Boy. 2022. 296 pages. FROM A STONE house in a tiny village at the edge of the Caspian Sea to the close quarters of a two-room Soviet apartment in the urban landscape of Almaty, the works in this first collection of contemporary writing by fourteen women from Kazakh-stan in English translation explore the challenges of modern life—personal, cultural, and political—in fresh and surprising ways. Gender roles are complex. In “Aslan’s Bride,” by Nadezhda Chernova, a modern city woman, Milochka, unlucky in love, frustrated and lonely, abruptly leaves the city to travel to the rural seashore. There, she is adopted as a daughter-in-law by an elderly villager as the bride her son, lost in a war, never had. Milochka finds worth and belonging through this “ghost marriage” in a remote landscape where “the sea smelled fresh, and under the crescent moon the sand glowed a gentle blue.” In “A Woman Over Fifty,” Lilya Kalaus muses on age, gender, and obsolescence through an image of a typewriter, now only useful as a creative container for a cactus. She writes, “What can our current reality offer to a woman over fifty?” advising, “Pick up that typewriter. Put it on the desk. Slide back the carriage, cough a few times, crack your knuckles . . . And type whatever your little heart desires, directly on to that cactus.” Politics infuse many of these pieces, but you might almost miss it. In “Black Snow of December,” Asel Omar documents a silenced period of student protests, inter-ethnic violence, and violent repression in the 1980s. She writes though the eyes of characters who, like most, only “witnessed” this period while hiding indoors, as far from trouble as possible: through rumor and hearsay, glimpses out windows, from doorways on furtive shopping trips. These subtle narratives question the extent to which individuals can control their own fates. The young protester who insisted that “It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees” becomes, years later, the corrupt police officer. The protagonist’s confusion at this transformation figures a society-wide confusion of roles and ethics: “He no longer knew who he was talking to.” Rooted in the landscape and cultures of Central Asia, these works are neither provincial nor exotic; they connect into the world and echo global history. The excerpt from “The Anthropologists,” by Zaure Batayeva, is a quasicomic piece on the collision between cultural stereotypes held by Western academics in Kazakhstan and the equally partial Kazakh ideas of “the West.” The odd popularity in post-Soviet regions of forgotten (but socialist!) writers like Theodore Dreiser, the belief that all Western academics are spies, and the bureaucratic hassles and paranoia of daily life in post-Soviet regions will all be recognizable to visitors. Conversely, westerners’ baffling ignorance of their own literature (Dreiser) and their marked oversensitivity to routine Kafkaesque scenarios will be familiar to residents of post-Soviet regions. And while this book went to press before Russia invaded Ukraine, it was jarring to realize that the fate of the ghost soldier in “Aslan’s Bride,” drafted under the USSR to fight a war in the West, may foreshadow the fates of so many men from poorer eastern regions of Central Asia today who are being recruited to wage war in Ukraine, far from their homes. These men leave holes in families and communities. Again. There are challenges in these works— but also a fierce sense of the power of simply existing. In “The Lighter,” by Olga Mark, a teen orphan girl swindles men and peddles sexual favors for cash to share with her orphan friends. This is a story of abjection—but also of a girl’s power in facing brutal conditions on her own terms—with an air of delight and unquenchable raw joy in the world around her. From the roof of a squatters’ building, “she looked for a long time at the city . . . then frozen, she...

Kyra Markham: An Introduction

Kyra Markham: An Introduction

Editor’s Foreword

Mission statements—awkward pairings of fine print and bold-faced idealism—rarely attract much attention. Electronic editions of scholarly journals often don’t publish them, even though they could do so without incurring expense, as print editions cannot. I appreciate the irony but wish to point out one section of the EOR’s statement to readers of both media: “Consideration will be given to submissions on topics relevant to but not centrally concerned with O’Neill, such as . . . work on O’Neill’s colleagues and collaborators in the Provincetown Players.” Hmmm. Granted, Bess Rowen’s performance-review section has kept pace with the Metropolitan Virtual Playhouse’s COVID-era streamings of plays by Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, and other pertinent dramatists. Generally, however, the Players have been underrepresented in our pages. EOR 43.2 signals a renewed commitment to their inclusion.The issue opens with eight letters from sometime-Provincetowner Kyra Markham to O’Neill’s biographer Lois Sheaffer, written from Haiti during the reign of “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Best remembered for her painting and, trivially, her youthful relationship with Theodore Dreiser, Markham proves a witty, worldly, sometimes wistful, and occasionally caustic commentator on O’Neill proprio, naturally, but also, per our mission statement, on his “colleagues and collaborators.” Among the subjects of her recollections are Djuna Barnes, Mary Blair, George Cram Cook, Dorothy Day, “Fitzi” Fitzgerald, Susan Glaspell, Mary Pyne, and Ida Rauh. Markham is a skilled epistolist, and Sheaffer’s talent for drawing out his subjects is clear from the increasing openness of her letters. Jeff Kennedy, whose Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players is due for publication this fall, expertly introduced and annotated the letters.Of course, there’s more. A strikingly original essay by Gerhart Bleifuss argues for the influence on The Hairy Ape of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s distasteful “Manifesto of Futurism” (1909). (“Such gaudy tulips grown from dung,” one might say, after Swift.) Bleifuss offers a provocative and sobering new perspective on Yank, the past’s assassin. “Substantial” seems a just descriptor of the essay, “durable” a good bet. A spirited and informative conversation between dramaturg Beth Wynstra and director Eric Fraisher Hayes—collaborators on the Eugene O’Neill Foundation’s Welded (2022)—transports us from the stokehold of Marinetti’s mind and onto (let’s say) a sun deck of creative coalescence. Welded is a tough play, and I expect more readers than I will appreciate Wynstra’s and Hayes’s elucidations of nuances and potentialities that might otherwise have remained obscure—literally, given Hayes’s fondness for the use of probing flashlights in this production.We’ve “gone long” on the Used Book feature, here expanded from its original 1,500–2,000–word format. David Palmer rises (extends?) to the occasion admirably in his reassessment of Joel Pfister’s Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (1995). That agile, sometimes chewy study benefits equally from Palmer’s talents as exegete and as hermeneut. Shorter reviews of newer books, commissioned by Zander Brietzke, appraise Patrick Chura’s Michael Gold: The People’s Writer (David Roessel) and Bess Rowen’s The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (Jennifer Buckley). We close with reviews of productions virtual, actual, and filmic by Marla Del Collins, Eileen Herrmann, William Davies King, Dan McGovern, Sheila Hickey Garvey, and yours truly.Sincere gratitude is due to Anabel Cole, Barbara Cole, Lisa Ruddick, and Kyra Markham’s other grandchildren for their genial correspondence and their permission to publish that fascinating woman’s letters. Thanks as well to the representatives of the International Susan Glaspell Society, whose collegiality augers well for the EOR’s future. And, as always, thanks to you, our readers.

Introduction: Socialist World Literature

Introduction:Socialist World Literature Yanli He (bio) and Daniel W. Pratt (bio) This special issue of The Journal of Narrative Theory, "Socialist World Literature," opens a window onto World Literature from the socialist perspective, through a focus on Socialist Realism broadly considered.1 Socialist Realism as a genre has largely been pilloried in Western scholarship, with a few notable exceptions, such as in the work of Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko. Clark herself describes the reaction when she would tell someone that her research was "on the Soviet Soviet novel, on those hundreds of unreadable texts that serve as examples of Socialist Realism": there would be a "dreadful pause," presumably of disbelief that such works could be seriously studied (Clark ix). Clark describes Socialist Realism as a taboo topic in Western scholarship (ix), and this situation is still true to a certain degree to this day. However, such a dismissive approach to Socialist Realism belies the power that it had throughout the twentieth century, and not just as the official genre of Soviet literature from 1933 to 1988. Socialist Realism, along with the Soviet project more generally, represented an alternative to Western European cultural hegemony for much of the world. If Russia had been "belated," as it was so often described, then the Bolshevik Revolution and the new Proletarian art transformed it into a leader on the world-historical stage. Socialist Realism went hand in hand with anti-colonial movements, liberation struggles, and the voices of ignored and oppressed literati all over the world. This led to a construction of World Literature centered on Moscow instead of the West, with Socialist Realism being the foundational form radiating from the new center. [End Page 267] In the Socialist countries, reimagining World Literature started in the 1930s, as a method of battling rising nationalism and fascist movements. During the First Soviet Writers' Congress of 1934 in Moscow, the German/Soviet critic and Socialist activist Karl Radek delivered a lengthy address, "Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art." According to Radek, there were three important historical events in the twentieth century that formed the criteria of how to evaluate the progress of World Literature: "the World War, the October Revolution and the fascists' advent to power in a number of countries" (74). Radek criticized the content of World Literature during World War I because it "sang songs in praise of war," with only a few exceptions, such as Maxim Gorky and Martin Andersen Nexø, but he claimed that the February Revolutions started to "turn world literature against the wars" of imperialism and colonial oppression (78). Radek specifically announced a new line of Socialist World Literature in his speech. According to him, the October Revolution began to change the landscape of World Literature, at first only in the negative way, because bourgeois literature became "an object of libel" for treating the October Revolution as "a mutiny of slaves engineered by scoundrels" and "the progeny of hell" (86). The development of an alternative to the hegemonic culture, according to Radek, "disturbed the minds of the more reflective representatives of world literature far more than did the events of October 1917" (91). The rise of the Soviet Union contributed to the "split in world literature" into two forms: "the literature of decaying capitalism, inevitably evolving towards fascism, [and] the new proletarian literature" with Moscow at its center (94). Bourgeois literature lost its "monopoly in world literature," and "proletarian literature was beginning to spring up in all countries" (95). Writers from all over the world were turning to Moscow for inspiration, and not just any authors, but already world-famous writers, such as Theodore Dreiser, Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, future Nobel laureate André Gide, and others. Radek understood Socialist World Literature and Socialist Realism in particular as part of the battle against fascism. Anyone who had remained with bourgeois literature was now forced to "side with [fascists]," and "write from the viewpoint of [fascist] philosophy" or join the proletariat (109). Thus, only one month after German fascists came to power on January 30, 1933, they lit a bonfire of German and World Literature near the [End Page 268] square of the University of Berlin. The...

An Analysis on Carrie’s Ethical Choices in Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie is the masterpiece of Theodore Dreiser, an American realist writer. The novel is set in the big cities of Chicago and New York at the turn of 20th century. At that time, Consumer Culture prevailed and money defined interpersonal relationship in the United States. This paper made an in-depth analysis of Carrie’s ethical choices from the perspective of Nie Zhenzhao’s Ethical Literary Criticism. Ethical Literary Criticism emphasizes that a novel should not be isolated from its ethical environment. Therefore, this paper focuses on the ethical environment at that time, Carrie’s moral confusion and and the ethical choices she makes. Meanwhile, it is summarized that Carrie is not a simply moral degenerate, but a new citizen who is deeply affected by social transformation with a new ethical tendency, which represents Dreiser’s ethical value.