American Fiction Since 1984

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts ETHICS AND URBAN REALITIES: AMERICAN FICTION SINCE 1984 A Dissertation in English by Sean Moiles © 2011 Sean Moiles Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2011 ii The dissertation of Sean Moiles was reviewed and approved* by the following: Kathryn Hume Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of English Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Michael Bérubé Paterno Family Professor in Literature Aldon Nielsen George and Kelly Professor in American Literature Tina Chen Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies Philip Jenkins Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of the Humanities Mark Morrison Professor of English Department Head *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii ABSTRACT ETHICS AND URBAN REALITIES: AMERICAN FICTION SINCE 1984 When critics and reviewers praise contemporary urban films and television productions, they often do so by comparing these texts to 19th-century realist and naturalist urban novels. David Simon’s HBO series The Wire, for example, has been lauded for its similarities to Dickens’s multilayered and realist vision of London. Unfortunately, these commentaries usually fail to acknowledge developments in contemporary U.S. urban fiction, perhaps in no small degree because much of this fiction explores the experiences of people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Ethics and Urban Realities challenges general assumptions about the state of U.S. urban fiction implied in commentaries on The Wire and made more overt in essays such as Tom Wolfe’s “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel” in which Wolfe blames poststructuralism for the supposed death of the urban novel. These faulty assumptions suggest why, despite the renewed “ethical turn” in literary studies, literary criticism has not engaged satisfactorily with the ethical frameworks of recent U.S. urban fiction. I argue that contemporary U.S. urban fiction is deeply invested in the ethics of urban life and that attentive readings of the fiction can promote strategies for developing more sustainable, peaceful, and healthier cities. Novels by Thomas Pynchon, Walter Mosley, David Treuer, John Edgar Wideman, Karen Tei Yamashita, Ernesto Quiñonez, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler, among others, disrupt thinking about U.S. cities in terms of “crisis” and “renaissance.” These two buzzwords pervade journalistic debates, historical writings, and popular representations of U.S. cities. Crisis discourse tends to frighten people about urban life, while the discourse of urban renaissance tends to make them complacent. Urban fiction puts needed pressure on these terms by showing how genuine crisis conditions affect lived experiences and how renaissance is conceptually and ethically limiting. My project, however, is not merely deconstructive and disruptive. It also assesses the ethical values that permeate U.S. urban fiction since 1984. These most prominently include commitments to inter-class and inter- racial contact, to what I term preemptive care, and to genuine creation in opposition to mindless consumption. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………...v Introduction: …………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter 1: Ghosts of Cities Past ……………………………………………………….22 Chapter 2: Blight, Crisis, and Urban Justice ………………..…………………………70 Chapter 3: The Ethical Crisis of Gentrification………………………………………..113 Chapter 4: Privilege, Renewal, and Urban Justice…..…………………………………138 Chapter 5: Ghosts of Cities Future……………………………………………………..188 Conclusion: …………………………………………………………………………….213 Works Cited: ……………………………………………………….…………………..218 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe heartfelt thanks to Kit Hume. She has been a positive influence throughout my time in graduate school, and I cannot imagine a more helpful and generous thesis supervisor. This dissertation is undoubtedly stronger because of contributions from all of my committee members. Michael Bérubé provided crucial insight throughout the project, helping me see and say better what I was seeing and saying poorly. Aldon Nielsen consistently drew my attention to weak claims and errors, and I appreciate his positive and encouraging feedback on all stages of the dissertation. Philip Jenkins has served as an important skeptical voice. His stunning range of knowledge has helped with the project’s historical components in particular. I did not ask Tina Chen to join the committee until after my comprehensive examinations, and I am exceedingly glad that she accepted. I am grateful for her feedback, which is always astute, and her support, which is always kind. My fellow graduate students, especially Katie Owens-Murphy and Jeff Gonzalez, have provided wonderful intellectual stimulation throughout the last few years. Meanwhile, the friendship of Ryan Hackenbracht and Brain Neff has helped sustain me through good times and bad. Generous support from the Crawford Fellowship provided absolutely invaluable time for the project’s completion. Thank you, Forrest Crawford and Sally Foote. I cannot thank enough my parents, James and Patricia Moiles. They have sacrificed much in support of their children; they deserve the world in return. Finally, the love of my life, Emily Williamson, has put up with me—no small achievement in itself—since the beginning of the project. I am extremely lucky to have her and our son, Andrew, in my life. 1 Ethics and Urban Realities: American Fiction since 1984 Introduction In a brilliant comedy sketch called “Being Taken to the Ghetto,” the famous African American comedian Dave Chappelle describes how one night at three o’clock in the morning his limousine driver had to take an unexpected trip. Riding along, Chappelle begins to notice what he characterizes as the “familiar symptoms” of ghetto life: liquor and gun stores, dilapidated buildings, and crack addicts, whom he claims check out the limousine like the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. The skit narrates the reading of a city space, suggesting how effective reading is tied to personal safety, but also to ethics. All of the ghetto-life signifiers in tandem with Chappelle’s material circumstances and temporality—sitting in a limousine in an impoverished and almost certainly dangerous neighborhood at three o’clock in the morning—click together in Chappelle’s mind to produce feelings of discomfort and fear. Ethics becomes especially central when Chappelle sees a “baby” selling “weed”: hyperbole for sure, but one that, as the audience’s reaction seems to confirm, has a certain plausibility to it. Chappelle claims to be shocked by the baby’s presence, but he states that he is not going to fall for the “old baby on the corner trick.” Nonetheless, a sense of moral responsibility for the baby soon overrides Chappelle’s conditioned caution, as he asserts, “I can’t let the fear ruin my morals.”1 Underneath Chappelle’s comedic dramatization of inner-city deprivation and fear—the humor cannot be adequately conveyed here (one must watch the sketch)—is serious social commentary and insight into the complicated relationship between ethics 1 To view the sketch, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLSHwzFUyz8. 2 and urban realities. As the conclusion of the sketch in particular highlights, however, choosing morality over fear—whatever “morality” might mean and regardless of one’s subject position—can be difficult. One thinks of wealthy and usually white liberal parents choosing to send their children to private rather than crumbling public schools, or perhaps the young adult drug dealer, as portrayed, for example, in David Simon’s stunning HBO series The Wire, who has few options but to “play [the game] or get played.”2 While fear understandably and frequently overpowers morality, the choice to “do the right thing,” as Spike Lee would put it, can be easier and more feasible than many of us would probably like to believe. When Abraham Ebdus in Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude calls for an ambulance for a drunkard whom passersby on a Brooklyn sidewalk could not, for over a week, confidently identify as living or dead and visits the man in the hospital, he makes a choice that is simply unimaginable for many. Within the larger context of post-World War II U.S. history, millions of people chose to leave cities for various reasons—to get away from publicly intoxicated homeless people certainly among them. Most of these reasons, moreover, exemplified the confluence of fear and ethics.3 For many middle- and upper-class families, fear of minorities and inner- city violence combined with the security and economic incentives of living in suburbia. These motives prevailed against an ethics of equal opportunity, mutual responsibility, and color blindness, while the older American cities rotted. 2 Omar, a violent and intelligent character who makes his living by mainly stealing drug dealers’ stashes, speaks this line to a detective on episode 5.1. The Wire brilliantly shows how the pressure to play the game or get played affects all aspects of society, not just the drug trade. 3 For important sources on the history of suburban development in the United States, see Jackson and Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck. 3 Dominant and popular representations of U.S. cities have provided ideological support for this tenor of anti-urbanism that prizes flight, individualism, and privatization.4 They tend to join ethics and anti-urbanism by arguing that impoverished urban residents are

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