A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature

W. Lawrence Hogue

Description

A reconfiguration of modern American history and a re-representation of the modern American novel

In this book, Hogue re-configures the history of modern America and re-represents the modern American novel, allowing conceptual spaces of race, gender, sex, nature, the non-rational, the non-human, consumption, and class to be critiqued or to be displaced, eventually highlighting that modern American history and literature are not singular. They are much more complex, diverse, heterogeneous, and richer because modern American history is a series of economic, social, anti-colonial, feminist, and political and social movements, levels, and conditions, with a whole interplay of differences. The book explains how, historically and institutionally, in the 1920s and 1930s modern American society and modern American literature have been represented singularly and monoculturally, with modernity breaking with the past/nature/the non-human—animals, plants, the water, the landscape, the non-rational, and/or indifferent forces of nature such as hurricanes.

This book focuses, first, on the transformation of modern American history, literature, and culture, which had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century. The transformation created a new and different and unequal modern American society through a series of events—many of them happening sequentially and simultaneously, the United States in the early 20th century grew into an economic superpower. Second, the book examines the darker side of this unequal modern American society: the legal racial segregation of people of color and the deadly economic exploitation of the working class, women, people of color, colonized nations, incorporated territories and protectorates. Third, it focuses on how vulnerable and marginalized people of color, women, working-class European immigrants, colonized nations, incorporated territories, protectorates, and writers, who were denied justice, difference and equality, resisted, challenged, re-wrote, and transformed this modern America.

The reconfiguration of the history of modern America is explored using Althusser’s concepts of the Repressive State apparatus and the Ideological State apparatuses, and postcolonial, feminist, psychoanalytical, deconstructive, cultural theories and Foucault/Deleuze’s notion of history, showing how the US in the 1920s and 1930s emerged as a rational, mechanical society with a business civilization, where mass production, consumerism and advertising contributed to the construction of the social and the subject. The book explains how progressives, labor unions, workers, the NAACP and the Garvey movement, socialists, communists, bohemians, Asian and Native American resistance movements, the Anti-Imperialist League, and the various sectors of the women’s movements—which co-existed and developed on parallel planes and which, at times, commingle in their becomings—challenged, contested, and, at times, transformed this economically, socially, and racially unequal, modern America.

Preface and Acknowledgments; Chapter One Capitalism, Imperialism, Race and Ethnicity, the Repressive State and the Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern America; Chapter Two Counterformations to Capitalism, Imperialism, Modern America and Its Repressive State and Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern American Literature, Art, and Culture; Chapter Three Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt : An Ethnographic Look at the Middle- Class, Individuated Subject in America in the 1920s; Chapter Four Nick Carraway’s Complicated Retreat from Modernity and the Construction of the Modern Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Chapter Five The African American Subaltern, Rearticulated African American Folklore, Modernity, and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; Chapter Six Trickster Narrator, Multinarrative Perspectives, and D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded; Chapter Seven Intersectionality, Inoperative Community, Trauma, Social Justice, and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth; Chapter Eight Theosophy, Plural Subjectivity, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood; Chapter Nine Exile, Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West; Chapter Ten Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 10 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781785272615
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature
A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature
An Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation
W. Lawrence Hogue
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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Copyright © W. Lawrence Hogue 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955661
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-259-2 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-259-4 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments
Chapter One Capitalism, Imperialism, Race and Ethnicity, the Repressive State and the Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern America
Chapter Two Counterformations to Capitalism, Imperialism, Modern America and Its Repressive State and Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern American Literature, Art, and Culture
Chapter Three Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt : An Ethnographic Look at the Middle-Class, Individuated Subject in America in the 1920s
Chapter Four Nick Carraway’s Complicated Retreat from Modernity and the Construction of the Modern Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Chapter Five The African American Subaltern, Rearticulated African American Folklore, Modernity, and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
Chapter Six Trickster Narrator, Multinarrative Perspectives, and D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded
Chapter Seven Intersectionality, Inoperative Community, Trauma, Social Justice, and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth
Chapter Eight Theosophy, Plural Subjectivity, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
Chapter Nine Exile, Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West
Chapter Ten Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for this book began more than 20 years ago as I tried to approach the teaching of the modern American novel, in a new multicultural, multiracial, and postcolonial way. Becoming increasingly aware that American writers of the 1920s and 1930s were socially, racially, ethnically, economically, and politically diverse—many coming out of economic, racial, gender, cultural, imperial, and political identitarian groups and social movements, I wanted to incorporate the richness and uniqueness of this diversity in my teaching. I also was fully aware that until recently, attempts to organize the history and literature of this period were exclusive, homogeneous, and quite Eurocentric. Second, as I read more American history, sociology, and economics of the modern and contemporary periods, it became clear to me that the issues confronting Americans in the 1920s and 1930s are still quite relevant today. The transformed modern America of the 1920s and 1930s has more in common with today than with the America of the 1820s and 1830s. Therefore, I wanted to look at that history and literature from a contemporary point of view, with contemporary historical, critical, and theoretical sensibilities, making the diverse history and literature of the 1920s and 1930s speak to the contemporary moment.
In addition to the diversity and richness of modern American history and literature, I was particularly impressed with, and interested in, how different American writers of this period understood, grappled with, engaged, and told stories about this new, modern American society. Therefore, I wanted to probe these writers’ examination of modern American society, comparing and contrasting the various assessments, critiques, visions, and perspectives.
A number of individuals and entities assisted me along the way. Over the years, I have had incredible students in my graduate seminars on the modern American novel. They allowed me the freedom to test this particular multicultural, postcolonial, and multiracial approach to the literature. I am thankful to them. I am deeply grateful to the Dean of CLASS, University of Houston, for a semester’s leave (FDL) during the spring of 2017, which allowed me to work full time on the manuscript. I am also indebted to the Office of the Provost, University of Houston, for a John and Rebecca Moores Distinguished professorship, which permitted me to visit and to procure documents from the Djuna Barnes Papers at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Emily Coleman Correspondences at the University of Delaware, and the D’Arcy McNickle Papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago. I am forever beholden to the staff of Interlibrary Loan, M. D. Anderson Library, University of Houston, who diligently worked with me to locate copies of obscure articles on Younghill Kang, Agnes Smedley, and D’Arcy McNickle.
Equally as important, I want to thank Jeffrey R. Di Leo, editor and publisher of the American Book Review and the founder and editor of the journal symplokē , for inviting me to submit this manuscript to his Anthem Symplokē Studies in Theory Series. Over the years, Jeffrey has been wonderful in supporting my on the edge theoretical approach to theory and literature. For that support, I am forever grateful. I also want to thank the three anonymous, peer-review readers who did close readings of the manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions for revision, assuredly making it a better book. Of course, I take full responsibility for any misgivings in the manuscript. Finally, I want to thank Tej P. S. Sood, publisher and managing director, and Megan Greiving, acquisitions editor, who shepherded my manuscript through the peer-review process, and the editorial staff at Anthem Press, who recognized the importance of this manuscript and saw it through to publication.
Chapter One
CAPITALISM, IMPERIALISM, RACE AND ETHNICITY, THE REPRESSIVE STATE AND THE IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUSES, AND THE FORMATION OF MODERN AMERICA
The 1920s and 1930s were the culmination of a transformation of American history, literature, and culture, which had begun in the mid-nineteenth century. The transformation created not only a new and different but also an unequal and inequitable modern American society. Through a series of events—many of them happening sequentially and simultaneously without being held together by societal norms and values—the United States in the early twentieth century grew into an economic superpower, with confidence in its new imperial power. Culturally, the era of the 1920s is known as the age of obedience and social conformity, representing itself as a modern, rational, middle-class, Christian, and industrial society. Patriarchal (families), Eurocentric, Victorian values and the repression of desires, sexual prudery, crass moneymaking, and privileged Anglo-Saxon “whiteness” comprise the American norm, which was the accredited regime of power/knowledge. The darker side of this unequal and inequitable modern American society was legal racial segregation and deadly economic exploitation of the working class, colonized indigenous nations, incorporated/occupied territories and protectorates. There was also second-class citizenship for women and people of color. The relation of power to knowledge supported this unequal “way of structuring the world that forecloses alternative possibilities of ordering” 1 and that did not “readily admit of the constraints by which that ordering takes place.” 2
But the United States’ emergence during the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century into an unequal and inequitable conformist, consumer, and an imperial formation entailed not only coexistent and parallel developments in industrial and technological growth, mass production, the rise of corporations and the stock market, urbanization, an “uneven constellation of state and local governments,” colonized indigenous nations, and federally administered public lands 3 but also parallel massive, multiracial, multiethnic, and multireligious immigration from Ireland, Germany, eastern and southern Europe, China, Japan, the Caribbean, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. In addition, there were the simultaneous rise of the labor, Civil Rights, Progressive, Native American and Asian, and women’s resistant and countermovements on the mainland and in the incorporated/occupied territories, which were not held together by a singular theme or value, which challenged and contested this unequal and inequitable modern American society, and which I will discuss in the next chapter. Thus, the emergence of modern America was a dynamic process of always becoming, which is a reinvention.
In this chapter, I construct a version of modern US history that will discursively capture the emergence of the parallel formation of these unequal and inequitable heterogeneous entities and their differential and relational capacities/configurations of power. I will view history not in terms of “grand narratives and causal explanations [but] in favour of events , […] not [in terms] of a unified history [but] in favour of a series