SFC Huge Diss

Thinking Locally: Provincialism and Cosmopolitanism in American Literature Since the Great Depression A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri- Columbia In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy by Jason Arthur Dr. Andrew Hoberek, Dissertation Advisor December 2007 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled THINKING LOCALLY: PROVINCIALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE THE GREAT DEPRESSION presented by Jason Arthur, a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy, English and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Associate Professor Andrew Hoberek Associate Professor John Evelev Professor Patricia Okker Professor Thomas Quirk Associate Professor Kristin Schwain For Sara, whose fingerprints are all over this dissertation. Acknowledgements My doctoral committee aided all aspects of the production of this dissertation. My advisor, Dr. Andrew Hoberek, saw this project through all its embarrassing potholes and dead ends. I would have never thought about most of what I’ve been thinking about for the past two years were it not for his expert advising. Drs. John Evelev and Pat Okker also read and provided helpful comments on multiple chapter drafts. Dr. Tom Quirk’s sage advice on all things regional guided this project aright. Dr. Kristin Schwain also provided helpful feedback and advice. Many other people read and critiqued portions of the manuscript, including Drs. Emma Lipton, Devoney Looser, Anne Myers, Donna Strickland. Dr. Jeffrey J. Williams was a consigliere; he read and responded to most of the chapters herein. Fellow graduate students Zak Watson and Crystal Lake also read a lot of the manuscript. Fellow contemporary regionalist, Dr. Douglas Reichart Powell was also a great inspiration, as was fellow friend Dr. James Andrew Miller. I also need to thank those at the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas, at Austin, who were so accommodating and collegial while I was in residence down there. Their financial and archival assistance was vital to the completion of this project. Thanks especially to Patrice Fox, who helped me daily while I was in residence at the Center. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Introduction: “Local Affiliations in Twentieth-Century America” 1 Chapter One: “Specific Soil: James Agee and the Poverty of New Deal Documentary” 36 Chapter Two: “Pavement: Jack Kerouac and the Delocalization of America” 94 Chapter Three: “The Chinatown and the City: Maxine Hong Kingston and the Relocalization of San Francisco” 153 Chapter Four: “Old New England and the New Third World: Russell Banks and the Living Wages of Cosmopolitan Citizenship” 209 Epilogue: “War in the Middle-West: Jonathan Franzen and Local Affiliations in the Twenty-First Century 273 Notes 307 Works Cited 372 Vita 394 iii Introduction: Local Affiliations in Twentieth-Century America1 You have only to look at all the autumn art about death and at all the spring art about life to get an idea: we are so blindfold [sic] by local fact that we cannot even imagine this simultaneity. It is comfortable, and to quite some extent natural, and no doubt to some extent wise, to be local: and yet in for instance politics we flatter ourselves we are outgrowing it. (James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 219) The cosmopolitan is local, and it is historical. (Robert Pinsky, “Eros Versus Esperanto” 86) In Writers for the Nation: American Literary Modernism (1997), Barry Chabot recalls an often-overlooked link between T.S. Eliot and Van Wyck Brooks. The arbiter of cosmopolitan modernism and the arbiter of localist nativism respectively, Eliot and Brooks were acquainted as undergraduates at Harvard.2 In fact, when he turned down Brooks’s offer to write reviews for The Freeman, Eliot expressed his memory of Brooks as the “prominent man of letters” at Harvard (qtd. in Chabot 16). Eliot’s affable rejection of Brooks occurred in 1920, two years before The Waste Land and the Dial Award thrust Eliot onto the world literary stage. The Dial editors praised Eliot’s “cosmopolitan vision”, part of which reads: “there is nowhere in his work that ‘localism’ which at once takes so much of American writing out of the field of comparison with European letters” (qtd. in Chabot 16). Ironically, Brooks, who “was identified precisely with the ‘localism’ 1 the editors had chastised when presenting the award to Eliot,” received the Dial Award the year after Eliot (16). This curious contradiction indicates that there is an under- examined continuity between literary efforts to champion local affiliations and literary efforts to distance one’s writing from specific locales. Indeed, before Brooks became disillusioned with the cosmopolitan affect of literary modernism, he had actually helped shape its development on American soil. The “preliminary moment” of modernism, as Chabot characterizes it, was dominated by the “tutelage of Brooks,” the primary objective of which was “to rectify the individualism [Brooks] assumed to be characteristic of American life by propagating a set of values or concerns that could weld a disparate people into a vital community” (16-17). Thus, in some sense, the modernist innovations of Brooks’s generation actually forecast the community-building social agenda of New Deal aesthetics. More importantly, these innovations developed out of an interest in “thinking locally,” or reflecting on one’s affiliation with the land that has failed to yield adequate forms of community. In addition to claiming that the objective of modernism was to repair the splintering of community on American soil, Chabot argues that the First World War actually harmed the aesthetic development of American modernism.3 Going against the common argument that the horrors of the “Great War” actually engendered the radical innovations of modernism, Chabot claims that it “sapped young intellectuals and writers of their energy and especially of their optimism” (17). Normally, the War is considered an occasion for American writers to engage in cosmopolitan themes and viewpoints; it led to wide-scale expatriation and, as with The Waste Land, lent an air of global currency to texts that are otherwise assemblages of the “broken images” gathered from experiences 2 with bankrupt locales. However, it is possible that the original plan for American modernism was not to embrace cosmopolitanism, but to put “young intellectuals” and literary talents to work reforming provincialism in America.4 Furthermore, these intellectuals and writers were to recognize that “local” America held for them a valuable model of affiliations and community building. As Chabot explains: American literary modernism … involves the recognition that even the seemingly fortunate are victimized by current economic and social life. … American literary modernism was primarily animated by efforts to repair this deficiency, to imagine conditions that would either restore to the national life the possibility that all citizens could enjoy access to functioning and supportive communities, or, failing restoration, at least provide something by way of a substitute. (2) In other words, before being hijacked by the salons of Europe, modernism had a social agenda to bring wider attention to local issues and thereby to better represent the uneven development of economic and social progress in the U.S.5 In this dissertation, I will consider the legacy of thinking locally in mid-century and contemporary American fiction. More specifically, I will argue that the persistent interest in contemplating local affiliations bespeaks the fact that the long division between cosmopolitanism and provincialism is a myth. To rephrase Brooks’s famous phrase, this myth creates a “useable present” wherein the codes that signify worldliness (or “cosmopolitanism”) and the codes that signify strictly local literacy (or “provincialism”) are held apart as opposites. This false polarity, which is “usable” primarily in the context of maintaining the geographic dimensions of economic 3 disparities, makes one’s economic situation appear to be an identity characteristic. Just as Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt personifies the uncultured middle class of the 1920s boomtown, the sharecropper personifies “the poor” of the 1930s rural zones. They are, as John Steinbeck was fond of calling migrant farmers in California, a “new race” of American.6 In both personifications, there is an assumption that the person being represented contains some engrained property that corresponds to his economic class. Indeed, Flannery O’Connor famously proclaims that fiction writers not only produce this conflation but also cherish it: the fact that we will always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction [to the fiction writer], for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself. His concern with poverty is with a poverty fundamental to man. (131) This conflation of poverty as an economic situation and as some cosmic stamp on humankind is common to fiction in general. The assumption that both senses of poverty are located in rural zones is common to American fiction after the Great Depression. An unfortunate byproduct of Depression era attempts to represent the plight of rural poverty is thus fiction that represents poverty in a way that reifies a revisable situation into an elemental condition. I start this introduction with a brief discussion of

Load more