Theodore Dreiser Research Articles

Lukács and the Limitations of Zolaesque Naturalism: A Critical Approach to Dreiser's Sister Carrie

This study addresses Georg Lukács’ critique of Zolaesque naturalism; for this purpose it draws on Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie as a case study. As a champion of realist novel, Lukacs emphasizes the totality of human experience and those dimensions of reality that are permanent and are objectively depicted in the works of art. From this perspective, he presents his critique of Zola's scientific method which, according to him, distorts reality, always seeks the average and is blind to the completeness of human experience. In this study, it is argued that a reading of Dreiser's Sister Carrie in the light of Zola's ideology testifies to the fact that although the philosophical roots of naturalism in America have been associated mainly with Zola's ideology but in some cases like Dreiser's Sister Carrie Zola's tenets prove to be inadequate or inept. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n2s1p225

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and 1920s Flapper Culture

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and 1920s Flapper Culture Donald Pizer (bio) Throughout the great length of An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser does not mention a specific year in which its action occurs. It is nevertheless clear from many incidental details in the setting, especially the prominence of the automobile, that he wishes his readers to understand that they are encountering contemporary events of roughly the early to mid-1920s. (The novel was written during 1923–25 and published in late 1925.) One of the significant characteristics of this post-war period was the rise and prominence of the liberated young woman, commonly known as the flapper. In this essay I will examine Dreiser’s use of the flapper figure in An American Tragedy in relation both to his attempt to authenticate the contemporaneousness of the “American tragedy” theme at the center of the novel and to dramatize a striking cultural irony present in the centrality of the type during this period. An American Tragedy is based on the Grace Brown-Chester Gillette murder case of 1906–08.1 Grace Brown, a resident of the upstate New York town of Cortland, was found pregnant, bruised, and drowned in an Adirondack lake in July 1906. Her lover, Chester Gillette, was convicted of murdering her after a sensational and widely reported trial in Herkimer in late 1906 and was executed at Auburn prison in March 1908. Dreiser was in his late thirties during the period of Grace Brown’s murder and the trial and execution of Chester Gillette. He had grown up in small Indiana towns and had by 1906 worked as a newspaperman in several major Midwestern cities and had lived as well in Chicago and New York. In addition to this personal familiarity with turn-of-the-century America, Dreiser’s documentary sources for the crime, principally the New York World reports of the trial, were of course also those of 1906–08. Yet he chose to set the novel not in that period but in the mid-1920s. [End Page 123] Dreiser’s decision had its roots in his conviction that the conditions underlying the Gillette case were not unique to the first decade of the twentieth century but rather characterized the entire period from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. Little had changed in American society during this period, he believed, except the public misconception that the present was distinguished by a lessening of older social restrictions. Dreiser wrote bluntly on this subject in 1921, just as the notion of the 1920s as a distinctive new epoch was beginning to take shape: I can truthfully say that I can not detect, in the post-war activities or interests, social, intellectual, or otherwise, of the younger or other generations of Americans, poor, rich, or middle class, any least indication of the breaking of hampering shackles of any kind—intellectual, social, monetary or what you will. The American as I encounter him, young or old, is the same old American, thin lipped, narrow-minded, money-centred, interested in the Ten Commandments as they apply to the other fellow, and absolutely blind to everything that would tend to enlarge, let alone vastly extend his world outlook. (Dreiser, “Americans” 230) Dreiser placed a similar emphasis on the cultural continuity of American culture since the Civil War in his frequent discourses on the pernicious effect of the Dream of Success on American youth. In account after account in which he explained the sources and inspiration for An American Tragedy, Dreiser emphasized that the Gillette-Brown case was only one of a long series of crimes with a similar configuration. For example, in a late 1926 interview, he stated that [The novel depicts] a typical American tragedy. There have been scores of cases like it. … It happens time and again in America. I considered this case and the other but the one I chose seemed to me to embody most clearly the elements which made these crimes typically American. A young man starts out after a career, untrained, unqualified, uneducated—with a high school education or even less. He is filled with the common dope of success that is injected into all...

Urban Space and Cultural Imagination: Representation of Working Girls in Theodore Dreiser's Novels by Yuping Wang

Urban Space and Cultural Imagination: Representation of Working Girls in Theodore Dreiser's Novels by Yuping Wang

Theodore Dreiser and the Modernists

Theodore Dreiser and the Modernists

American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence by Debbie Lelekis

Reviewed by: American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence by Debbie Lelekis Maria Seger (bio) American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence, by Debbie Lelekis. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015. x + 116 pp. Cloth, $70.00; Ebook, $69.99. In an era that has witnessed increased public attention to mass incarceration, police brutality, and state-sanctioned violence through such movements as Black Lives Matter, it is no wonder that American literature scholars have taken a renewed interest in investigating the nation’s history of racial violence and justice. In American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence, Debbie Lelekis explores how the spectator figure functions to “expose the central tension of American democracy,” the delicate balance between individual and collective rights (3). In doing so, she engages the rise of professional journalism, focusing on the reporter character as spectator and the role of the reporter-novelist. Through analyses of realist texts, including canonical and lesser-known short stories and poetry published in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Lelekis demonstrates how American literature commented on the power struggles that modernity generated—amplified by increased urbanization, diversity, and political representation—by depicting spectators witnessing lynching scenes. In employing spectatorship as a lens, Lelekis draws together critical work on the history of American vigilantism, the crowd in American literature, and journalism’s influence on American letters. Relying on the work of such scholars as Amy Louise Wood, Mary Ryan, and Jean Marie Lutes, she contends that her blended approach allows us to understand how the spectator became a “key figure for communicating and challenging” the American struggle to weigh the claims of the individual against those of the community (20). Highlighting the spectator’s position both within and apart from the crowd, Lelekis employs two definitions of the term spectatorship throughout the study: one from Dennis Kennedy, which emphasizes active participation, and one from Wood, which centers on one’s ability to bestow significance on an event by witnessing it. Spectators of lynch mobs, Lelekis importantly notes, differ from those composing other [End Page 102] types of crowds, such as strikes or rallies, because they reveal how collective action can pervert rather than strengthen democratic systems. American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd examines the short stories of former journalists Theodore Dreiser, Miriam Michelson, Irvin S. Cobb, and Paul Laurence Dunbar in two thematic parts that focus on the journalist as spectator (Chapters 2 and 3) and the impact of authors’ reporting careers on their fiction about spectators (Chapters 4 and 5). Following the critical introduction provided in Chapter 1, the second chapter reads Dreiser’s “Nigger Jeff” (1901), arguing that the story critiques lynching by transforming the reporter protagonist from “simple observer to active spectator,” inspiring readers within and outside of the story to actively question and confer meaning onto such events (40). But it is in Chapter 3 that Lelekis makes her most compelling contribution, building on the work of Lori Harrison-Kahan and Karen E. H. Skinazi in interpreting Michelson’s “Honors Are Easy” (1905). Suggesting that the story condemns the public consumption of lynching and implicates the crowd in the act itself, she also investigates its complex and conflicting gender implications, identifying the female reporter protagonist as both spectator and spectacle due to the tradition of immersion journalism historically popular with newspaperwomen. The following two chapters diverge from the previous two, focusing on other types of white professionals (a judge and a doctor) as spectators and examining the impact of authors’ journalism on their fiction’s content and style. The fourth chapter analyzes the realism of Cobb’s “The Mob from Massac” (1912) in light of a news story he published on an 1896 lynching in Kentucky. Here, Lelekis teases out the dynamics of southern borderlands, bourgeoning middle-class consciousness, and white supremacy, arguing that the story rejects lynching and inspires a call to action through its realist attributes, such as “rationalism and attention to detail” (86). Concluding her study with a chapter on Dunbar’s story “The Lynching of Jube Benson” (1904) and his poem “The Haunted Oak” (1903), she argues that the...

The Age of Anxiety: Patricia Highsmith, Existential Psychology, and the “Decline” Of American Naturalism

This essay charts the development of two entwined intellectual threads during the 1950s: the translation of European existentialism into an American idiom and what Nathan Hale describes as the “golden age of popularization” for psychoanalysis in the United States. I argue that, in concert, these two movements contributed to the erosion of the New Deal regulatory state by elevating psychological—rather than structural or socioeconomic—explanatory templates for social phenomena. In contrast to the literature of the long Progressive Era, in 1950s works the ego and its vicissitudes become the dominant template for understanding society and the self. Patricia Highsmith's novels provide a nodal point for this political and intellectual history as she recasts representations of violence, murder, alienation, class envy, and social mobility in ways that both represent and helped define the legitimation crisis of the regulatory state. Highsmith repudiates a narrative world governed by structural or environmental conditions and—in contrast to literary naturalists like Theodore Dreiser and John Steinbeck—presents the darker corners of human experience as phenomena of the largely autonomous, internal arena of an existential psyche. These shifts in literary tastes, the essay argues, augmented the weakening intellectual purchase of an interventionist New Deal reform agenda during the 1950s.

Introduction to Focus: The Fiction of the Workers

Introduction to Focus: The Fiction of the Workers Eric Miles Williamson (bio) This Focus Issue has nothing to do with a bunch of—what do you want to call us?—rednecks, white trash, working poor, working class, lower-middle class, lower class, what-the-hell-ever writers. None of us likes any of these terms. It’s like trying to find a name for any minority group: all the names are offensive, since they only indicate that we’re not as respected, not as good as the rich white people who tell us what to do. It has everything to do with the availability of higher education between the end of WWII and the end of the Cold War under Reagan and how it has changed American, and perhaps World, literature. No longer do trust fund babies have a monopoly on great writing, though they do have a monopoly on the big publishing houses, including the bigger small presses. Of course, America has a long tradition of writers who have not come from wealth—Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Erskine Caldwell, Eugene Di Donato, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison. But since WWII, this tradition has exploded. Since World War II, for the first time in history, people who weren’t rich got to go to college, to universities, en masse. The GI Bill funded Norman Mailer and Robert Coover, for instance, who went to fine universities (Harvard, the University of Chicago). It funded the young star Joseph Haske. It funded Paul Ruffin’s education. Most of my generation got to go to public universities for virtually nothing. Community colleges in California, where I grew up, were free. My college, California State University, Hayward, charged me $72 bucks a semester to go to school, and back then I was making twenty grand a year as a union construction worker just during summers and Christmas and spring breaks. I got to study like a rich kid, and I did. And that’s what Ron Cooper, did, and Joe Haske, and Michael Gills, and Larry Fondation, and Juan Ochoa, and William Hastings and Marc Watkins, and Patrick Michael Finn, and Steve Davenport. Barry Hannah. Harry Crews. Tom Franklin. Donald Ray Pollock. Chris Offutt. Dagoberto Gilb. The critic and editor Daniel Mendoza and many more. Our ranks are, for now, swollen. This is now ending, however. With the de-funding of state colleges and universities, tuition is no longer affordable for working-class kids. They have to take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. If I were eighteen today, I’d have to stay a construction worker. The tuition at the state university I attended is now over ten grand a year, more than I could make today as a teenager, and so I’d be screwed. This era, unique in the history of man, about forty years, of the working-class novel, the working-class writer or artist or any sort, will be over when my generation dies. Working class people will not go to college, will work minimum wage jobs, and sure as hell will not write books about those jobs. Click for larger view View full resolution Eric Miles Williamson, Focus Editor. I’ve been editing literary journals, Gulf Coast, Chelsea, American Book Review, Boulevard, Texas Review, Pleiades, and many others, since 1984. What I noticed was that slowly, and with increasing frequency, writers from modest backgrounds were telling their stories, writing their poems, publishing their essays. People like Phil Levine and Barry Hannah and Harry Crews were getting published and becoming professors. I’d get the typical Updike-like New Yorker style stories about existential angst and middle-class people bemoaning their personal relationships, sometimes superbly written, and I’d loathe them, thinking Get A Job And Stop Whining, and so instead I’d publish a talented writer, perhaps less skilled, who told a story about the working class from which he or she had come. Many of these authors I saw into publication (or reviewed for major venues) became associates, and sometimes friends. We started to coalesce into a ragtag community, paying attention to each other as we became aware...

Скептический паломник: Теодор Драйзер и Русская Православная Церковь в 1927 г

Скептический паломник: Теодор Драйзер и Русская Православная Церковь в 1927 г

Beyond Gatsby: how Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and writers of the 1920s shaped American culture

Preface Introduction: The Twenties Chapter One Beyond the Wasteland: T.S. Eliot, the Lost Generation, and the Postwar World Chapter Two Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald: Friendship and Rivalry Chapter Three William Faulkner: A Southern Voice in the Age of Modernism Chapter Four Modernism and Popular Culture in the Age of Ezra Pound and James Joyce Chapter Five Midwest Vision and Values: Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather Chapter Six Sounds of the City: Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Anzia Yezierska, Langston Hughes Chapter Seven History and Mythmakers: Edith Wharton, Stephen Vincent Benet, William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

Theodore Dreiser's First Novel (to the 115th Anniversary of “Sister Carrie's” Publishing)

The article is devoted to Theodore Dreiser's skill as a writer of a novel. His first book “Sister Carrie” characterized his writer's manner in which the author was unhurried deliberate and thorough master. In his first novel Th. Dreiser shows himself as a deep psychologist and stylist. “Sister Carrie” is a landmark in the history of American literature as well as in the history of world realistic literature of the XXth century.

Time-Tables, Visual Culture, and the Reconfiguration of Subjectivity in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy

All the wet, snowy sidewalk was bright with this radiated fire. It was so bright that it attracted Hurstwood's gaze. He looked up, and then at a large, gilt-framed posterboard, on which was a fine ...

The Language of the Stones: The Agency of the Inanimate in Literary Naturalism and the New Materialism

A suspicion toward inherited notions of agency has long been recognized (and frequently decried) as a defining feature of literary naturalism. But while the deterministic worldview of writers like Theodore Dreiser generated much lively debate in the early twentieth century, literary scholarship’s investment in the unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) questions of inanimate agency raised by such works was gradually eclipsed by other concerns. Recently, however, a vigorous interest in such metaphysical questions has resurfaced in the discourse of new materialism, an interdisciplinary and politically committed field of scholarship dedicated to revising humanity’s conventional associations of materiality with passivity and predictability. While this is ostensibly a “new” movement, placing new materialism in the context of American literary history underscores how old—or rather timeless—the concerns addressed by the new materialism really are. Given these similarities, Trumpeter proposes that new materialist discourse stands to profit from a more nuanced understanding of literary naturalism and the discourse of new materialism can likewise help American literary scholars return to naturalist works with a more refined and reenergized perspective on the genre’s perennial concerns. This essay examines the role of the inanimate in Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy as a means for tracing connections and highlighting divergences between these two intellectual movements engaged in drawing humanity’s attention to the surreptitiously active nature of things.

The Workingman’s Reward, Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl. By Elaine Lewinnek (New York, Oxford University Press, 2014) 239 pp. $45.00

This book provides readers with an insightful case study of patterns of human habitation in metropolitan Chicago. Although Lewinnek fixed its chronological parameters between 1860 and 1930, she nonetheless ventures in the direction of contemporary history.Lewinnek’s initial sentence stakes the terrain: “Chicago’s first product was real estate.” She subsequently elaborates upon the real-estate marketplace, finance, geography, and construction. But this is hardly a book about joints and arches or dollars and cents. What makes the book interesting is Lewinnek’s clarification of it as “an analysis of ideas as well as actions.” It could have proved a dismal social-scientific treatise filled with theories and statistics. Instead, it introduces “novels and poetry as well was bank records and real estate maps.” Nelson Algren, Theodore Dreiser, Henry Blake Fuller, Louise Montgomery, Upton Sinclair, and Richard Wright step onto the stage. Readers will search in vain for Jane Addams—no entry in the index—who inexplicably hardly figures into this book.Among the strengths of this study is its determination to place race in its storyline. Although this landscape is well known, Lewinnek unflinchingly and deftly manages to integrate race into a broader, much-welcomed demographic context.1 The chapter entitled “The Mortgages of Whiteness” revisits the often-told narrative of the race riot of 1919 (“the riot helped move race relations toward a black-white binary”). Lewinnek, to her credit, recounts this narrative at ground level, for example, the paragraph in which she reports that the mean commute to work at the Argo Corn Refining Company for African Americans was one hour and for whites thirty-two minutes.One aspect of The Workingmen’s Reward warrants elaboration. Lewinnek’s spatial sensibilities—inside Chicago, within the area commonly known as suburban Cook County, and the five outer counties—are lacking. To be sure, she rightfully labels the key word suburban as a recurring trope subject to change. Chicago’s great annexation of 1889 admittedly complicates the narrative. But for all of Lewinnek’s keen attention to mapping and ecology in Chapter 5, at times she might have covered a broader geographical plane. Geddes, who wrote at the turn of the last century, stated the matter of metropolitan geography succinctly: “[I]t takes the whole region to make the city.” It is not always clear whether Lewinnek situates readers within Chicago’s boundaries or beyond them. To this point, the six maps in this chapter—dating back in some instances to the nineteenth century—disappoint. In an age when the nexus of cartography and digital production offers endless, inexpensive possibilities, twenty-first century visuals would have been most welcome, and appropriate, in this book.The Workingmen’s Reward, in spite of these concerns, is an insightful, thought-provoking, and highly readable book. It will surely appeal to those focused on cities and their diverse real-estate marketplaces. Lewinnek is especially adept at populating her narrative with the variety of people—buyers, sellers, and tenants—who contended with the complex, and even humiliating, contingencies entailed in their pursuit of satisfying human habitation.

Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism by Isaac Weiner (review)

Isaac Weiner, Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 264 pp.The opening chapter of Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel, An American Tragedy, describes a small family proclaiming the (very Christian) word of God on a street corner of a large midwestern American city. Dreiser's rich prose hints, albeit indirectly, at the density of sound in the cityscape: throngs of people streaming on the sidewalks, lines of cars with clanging bells, towering buildings creating canyon-like spaces. Against this backdrop of the densely layered sounds-the noise-of urban public space, the family breaks out a portable pump organ and sings psalms and preaches from the Bible, struggling both to be heard against the din of the city and to be listened to amidst the of secular life that the city both represents and enables, even as their preaching adds to that noise.Like Dreiser, Isaac Weiner's fascinating book, Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism, takes as its starting point that consists not simply of systems of substantive content, moral claims, and theological arguments (199), but rather is fundamentally constituted by the expressive practices that enact such systems, and a recognition that such practices involve, in most cases, acts of public sounding. Weiner uses this observation as an inroad to examining how Americans have historically negotiated religious differences in urban contexts since the early 1800s by detailing select disputes concerning religious sound in the public sphere that made their way through legal and legislative channels in various parts of the country at different points in time. In particular, Weiner focuses on instances in which people complained that religion was, simply, a source of unwanted noise. Putting words in the mouths of a hypothetical complainant, he asks, spirituality have to be so noisy? Does religion have to be so loud? (195). The answer, or course, is that not all religious sound is noisy per se, but that is subjectively ascribed from within a context of social relations and social difference. The history of complaints about religious in the US is, Weiner argues, one in which noise demarcated difference more generally, threats to a dominant social order that had to be carefully contained. Sensory values expressed social hierarchies, and cacophony signified social chaos. Noise marked the limit of what could be tolerated (5). Thus loud religion is not simply measured in terms of decibels (though that may be part of the ascription of noisiness), but across other, multiple dimensions such as intelligibility, location, and perceived temporal and spatial appropriateness. While Religion Out Loud provides a detailed analysis of several instances in which religious practice was contested on the basis of its noisiness, Weiner's ultimate questions concern the ways in which religious pluralism has been historically negotiated in the US, and he argues that sound, because of its potentially uncontainable nature, is a particularly insightful locus in which to examine the intricacies of those negotiations.Weiner relies heavily on the analysis of specific court cases in which the right to make religious sounds was challenged, as well as specific legislative instances such as the drafting of municipal ordinances. He argues that the US courts have routinely functioned to domesticate religious enthusiasm and restrain religious dissent and have thus served to encourage alternative forms of piety that can more readily be kept quiet (7). The courts, in other words, have participated in the establishment of constraints upon religious expression, and these constraints have largely taken the form of circumscribing religion's public presence, keeping it contained in ways that are consistent with liberal-Protestant and Post-Enlightenment ideas about 'good' religion, conceiving it as properly internalized, individualized, and intellectualized (196). …

The Difficult Art Of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market by Francesca Sawaya (review)

Reviewed by: The Difficult Art Of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market by Francesca Sawaya Bell Julian Clement THE DIFFICULT ART OF GIVING: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market. By Francesca Sawaya. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. This collection of five essays from literary historian Francesca Sawaya examines the evolving American practice of philanthropy from the Gilded Age into the first third of the twentieth century through the writings of Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens, Charles Chesnutt, and Theodore Dreiser. The essays trace the patterns of philanthropic giving depicted in their works and consider the role of philanthropy in the careers of each. Sawaya calls on the writings of Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, Andrew Carnegie, and John Rockefeller to observe that philanthropy plays an ambiguous role in a “free market” society. Philanthropic interventions are necessary to fill the gaps left by the market and allow the society to function, but these very interventions call into question the assumptions of market equity and efficiency on which the society is founded. The role of philanthropy in literary production is equally problematic: artists are hedged in, ideologically as well as practically, by the social constructs which produce the gifts that support their art. The works of Sawaya’s five literary observers illustrate the uncertainty and circuity of philanthropy’s impacts. The patronage offered political radicals by James’s Princess Casamassima is queered by the bitterness that motivates her. Only when giving is institutionalized, [End Page 134] suggests James, as in the plan of The Golden Bowl’s Adam Verver to establish a grand public art gallery, may its inherently questionable motives be transmuted into worthy outcomes. In Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, editor Basil March can hardly be unaware that the doubtful source of the philanthropy that makes his new literary venture possible—the profits that capitalist Jacob Dryfoos sweats out of his workers—gives the lie to the critical “detachment” he wishes to claim for it. Howells suggests the circumstances under which artistic independence may survive philanthropy in the character of Alma Leighton—a freelancer who accepts sponsorship but declines to be grateful. Twain sends a Yankee into King Arthur’s court bearing managerial capitalism as his gift and blind to the devastating impacts of his “scientific philanthropy” on that society; such philanthropy becomes “relatively innocuous, perhaps even promising” only in comparison to the depredations of free-trade imperialism limned in such late Twain essays as “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (133). In The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt leads Colonel French to the realization that well-intentioned northern philanthropy serves only to exacerbate violence in the southern town he had hoped to help in its refusal to address fundamental questions of social and racial justice. Chesnutt holds out the hope that a return to those fundamentals could enable a productive philanthropy. Dreiser shows that his financial titan, Frank Cowperwood, is dependent upon dense “networks of connection” in navigating a market system that, far from “free,” works “through carefully constructed and nurtured patronage systems” (183). For all his manipulative ability, Cowperwood’s philanthropic successes are ironic, his real achievements other than what he intended them to be. Sawaya’s tracing of the operation of philanthropy in the works of these American masters highlights the fiction of the “free market”—dependent as it as on philanthropic and other interventions for its survival—to which American society remains enthralled. Her explorations likewise reveal the fond fiction of a free, meritocratic market in literary production, showing that the production of these authors relied on complex webs of friendship and sponsorship. Bell Julian Clement The George Washington University Copyright © 2015 Mid-America American Studies Association

Being Ralph Ellison: Remaking the Black Public Intellectual in the Age of Civil Rights

Most of the social realists of the period were concerned less with tragedy than with injustice. I wasn't, and am not, primarily concerned with injustice, but with art.-Ralph Ellison, Art of Fiction: An InterviewInterviewer: How do you feel about the criticism you sometimes get from black students who feel you haven't been militant enough?Ellison: I say, You'd be your kind of militant and I'll be my kind of militant.-Interview with Ralph Ellison, Washington Post, August 1973Soon after he published Invisible Man in April 1952, Ralph was quickly recognized as being the most prominent African American writer of his generation. Or, as Lawrence Jackson pointedly notes, Ellison had moved from being an embattled social critic, a position he had occupied during most of the years he wrote Invisible Man, to being a symbol of America's willingness to accept talented blacks.1 The publication of Invisible Man, coupled with the National Book Award he received a year after its publication, heralded the arrival of a new, formidable African American voice on the mainstream literary stage. also became widely recognized as a public intellectual who came to rep- resent, to many, a writer whose ideas affirmed the possibilities of black American intellectualism. himself seemed to feel the same sense of possibility. The acceptance speech he gave after receiving the National Book Award spoke as directly to his elevated position as a novelist as it did to his desire to define and occupy his newly acquired public role and to shape his audience's thoughts about the ways he believed his work should be understood. Although Richard Wright was an early mentor of and supporter of the work he encouraged to do, quickly defined for himself a body of ideas and a foundation of American philosophical and political thought on which his literary and intellectual aspirations were self-consciously built. His political foundation was embodied by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. His thoughts about literature were based in the literary production characterized by the writing of Mark Twain, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. It is worth emphasizing that Ellison's literary apprenticeship was shaped by his association with a group of literary, intellectual, and political radicals who dismissed many of the New Negro movement's Africanist identifications in favor of Marxist readings of black proletarian experience in America that firmly radicalized the political solution to the race problem.My interest in this article is the period between the publication of Invisible Man and the early 1970s (roughly the period defined by the civil rights movement), when crafted his strategy for how he would define and occupy the public role in which he found himself and his work suddenly placed. As a public figure, engaged in a variety of broad cultural debates and conversations. While those ideas circulated in ways that certainly could not have controlled, my point here is that this was also the period when began a consciously revisionist process that deflected attention to his work away from its leftist origins and toward something that was decidedly more rooted in a language of aesthetics, of modernist impulse, and, most universally, of what he referred to in various ways as democratic possibility. When first began to control the narrative surrounding the reception of his work, the left was under attack in ways of which was certainly keenly aware. But was also keenly aware of his audience and keenly aware of the representative stature that he and his work occupied during that period.Invisible Man was a breakthrough novel that synthesized mid-twentieth-century African American racial consciousness with America's broader cultural aspirations and accomplishments. …

“The Game as It Is Played”: Essays on Theodore Dreiser by Donald Pizer (review)

“The Game as It Is Played”: Essays on Theodore Dreiser by Donald Pizer (review)

Theodore Dreiser: The Supernaturalism of a Naturalist

This paper examines a lesser-reviewed work of Theodore Dreiser and examines his views of “spirit” or “sub-conscious” in his “Plays of the Natural and Supernatural”. The paper provides a unique, but well-documented perspective on Dreiser’s perceptions of a kind of “spirit world” that appears to be parallel to the material world in which, as a naturalist, he normally restricts himself. This paper examines a view of Dreiser that is too often overlooked or discounted because it doesn’t fit the “normal” narrative of Dreiser. This paper does not make the claim that Dreiser was not a naturalist in his writing — only that his doctrine of the material and the spiritual, and his understanding of the complexity of the human mind, is both complicated and rewarding to study.

Norman Mailer, Theodore Dreiser, and the Politics of American Literary History

Norman Mailer, Theodore Dreiser, and the Politics of American Literary History

Exploring capitalist fiction: business through literature and film

Preface Introduction Chapter 1. The Rise of Silas Lapham: A Story of Self-Identity, Self-Respect, and Morality Chapter 2. Taking a Look at Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward Chapter 3. Frank Norris's The Octopus: An Epic of Wheat and Railroads Chapter 4. The Financier: Theodore Dreiser's Portrait of a Darwinian Businessman Chapter 5. Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky Chapter 6. Babbitt: Sinclair Lewis's Portrait of a Middle-Aged Middle Class Businessman Chapter 7. is Henry M. Galt?: A Review of Garet Garrett's The Driver Chapter 8. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Chapter 9. An American Romance: King Vidor's Epic Film of Immigration and the American Dream Chapter 10. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: A Case of Self-Delusion Chapter 11. John P. Marquand's Point of No Return Chapter 12. Henry Hazlitt's Time Will Run Back: A Tale of the Reinvention of Capitalism Chapter 13. Executive Suite: A Story of Corporate Success and Succession Chapter 14. Cash McCall: The Story of a Heroic Corporate Rider Chapter 15. Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Chapter 16. Atlas Shrugged: An Epic Story of Heroic Businessmen Chapter 17. Sometimes a Great Notion: The Story of a Family Who Would Never Give an Inch Chapter 18. Wilfrid Sheed's Office Politics: A Lesson about Organizational Conflict Chapter 19. The Franchiser: Stanley Elkin's Tale of a Man Who Wanted to Costume the Country Chapter 20. Glengarry Glen Ross: A David Mamet Word Play Chapter 21. Wall Street: Oliver Stone's Zero-Sum Vision of Capitalism Chapter 22. Tucker: The Man and His Dream Chapter 23. David Lodge's Nice Work: A Tale of Two Cultures Chapter 24. Other People's Money: A Tale of Capitalism and Creative Destruction Chapter 25: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Conclusion