The Mediating Nation: American Literature and Globalization from Henry James to Woodrow Wilson
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THE MEDIATING NATION: AMERICAN LITERATURE AND GLOBALIZATION FROM HENRY JAMES TO WOODROW WILSON NATHANIEL CADLE A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English. Chapel Hill 2008 Approved by Advisor: Jane Thrailkill Reader: Tyler Curtain Reader: Joy Kasson Reader: Timothy Marr Reader: John McGowan © 2008 Nathaniel Cadle ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii Abstract Nathaniel Cadle: The Mediating Nation: American Literature and Globalization from Henry James to Woodrow Wilson (Under the direction of Jane Thrailkill) The Mediating Nation: American Literature and Globalization from Henry James to Woodrow Wilson reconstructs the history of American globalization between 1875 and 1920 through an analysis of literary and public discourse about the United States’ place in the world. Engaging the work of sociologists like Roland Robertson, who locates the origins of globalization in this period, I argue that American identity emerges only in relation to—and interaction with—the rest of the world. This approach therefore rejects exceptionalist readings of American literature, offering instead a functionalist account of the formation of American identity and culture that focuses on America’s position in the international community. The Mediating Nation integrates and expands the work of several recent literary critics, including Walter Benn Michaels, who reveals how racial and cultural anxiety shaped American writers’ sense of national identity, and Amy Kaplan, who demonstrates how American authors underwrote U.S. policies of imperial expansion. In the first section of this project, I establish how global theory contributes to our understanding of American literary scholarship and what historical events and developments turned the United States into a globalized nation. Then, I explore the language that politicians and public intellectuals like Woodrow Wilson and William James used to make sense of these developments. In subsequent chapters, I demonstrate that, through their writing, such authors as Jack London, Abraham Cahan, and iii Henry James engaged with and elaborated on the emerging features and problems of globalization, including imperialism, immigration, and the global cultural economy, in order to propel the United States into a more important and powerful position in the international community. iv Acknowledgements I have heard many people describe the process of writing a dissertation as a very lonesome, isolating experience. On the whole, however, that has not been the case for me. I have had the good fortune to work and study in an extremely sociable and supportive environment, and for that, I thank the faculty and graduate students (past and present) of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More specifically, I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their advice and for their sustained interest in my project. First and foremost among them, I wish to thank my director, Jane Thrailkill, for her commitment to my success as a student and as a professional scholar. She is a remarkably incisive and insightful reader, and working under her guidance over the past few years has been an extremely rewarding learning experience. I know that I have become a better writer and more thoughtful scholar because of my contact with her. I also want to extend my appreciation to John McGowan, Tim Marr, Joy Kasson, and Tyler Curtain—all of whom have encouraged my professional development and enriched my dissertation in incalculable ways. In keeping with my project’s global dimensions, I also would like to express a general debt of gratitude to the friends I made when I studied at the University of Exeter during the 2000-01 academic year. It was the diverse cosmopolitan make-up of my colleagues there (British, German, Argentinean, Canadian, Australian, Rwandan, and Norwegian, among others) and the international perspectives they brought to bear upon my own American identity that sowed the seed for this project and made me realize just how dynamic and empowering globalization can be. Finally, I thank my parents and my brothers for their continued support and encouragement throughout my graduate studies. It is almost certainly because I grew up in a family that valued education and intellectual curiosity for their own sake that I first considered pursuing a Ph.D. and managed to find the discipline to complete it. v Table of Contents Introduction: Global Theory, Radical Empiricism, and American Literary Studies………..1 Chapter 1: “World-Salvation”: The History and Rhetoric of the Globalization of America…………………………………………………………………25 Chapter 2: Preferred Courses and Queer Falsities: The American and Henry James’ Re-Vision of a Global Cultural Economy…………………………..76 Chapter 3: Circulating America: Abraham Cahan, Knut Hamsun, and a Global Perspective on the Immigrant Experience………………………………....127 Chapter 4: “Freedom Amongst Aliens”: Jack London, Lafcadio Hearn, and the Alternative Modernity of Japan…………………………………………...168 Coda: American Literary Responses to the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19 and to the Uncontrollability of Globalization……………………………...213 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………239 vi Introduction: Global Theory, Radical Empiricism, and American Literary Studies In the January 2001 issue of PMLA , Paul Jay sounded a call for further study of “literature’s relation to the processes of globalization as they manifest themselves in a variety of historical periods” and “literature’s facilitation of economic and cultural globalization.” 1 Drawing attention to the increasingly porous boundaries between the national literatures that have traditionally defined the discipline of English, Jay challenged his colleagues not only to embrace that porosity but also to trace and understand its historical origins. Doing so, he suggested, would bring to literary analysis a more dynamic means of accounting for the functionality of literary texts as cultural commodities and historical artifacts. In the seven years since Jay’s article appeared, the discipline of English, as well as many other humanities disciplines, has experienced an explosion of discourse about globalization. That is not to say that Jay’s article was itself responsible for the recent rise of interest in globalization among literary scholars. In their attempts to internationalize both American Studies and the study of American literature, a cadre of scholars known collectively as the “New Americanists,” of whom I shall say more in the following pages, has been discussing topics closely related to globalization, including imperialism, immigration, cultural economy, and international diplomacy, since the early 1990s. 2 Yet I have singled out Jay’s article partly because of the clarity of its 1 Paul Jay, “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English,” PMLA 116.1 (2001): 35. 2 The New American Studies: Essays from Representations , ed. Philip Fisher (Berkeley: California UP), was published in 1991, and Duke University Press inaugurated its New Americanists series in 1993 with central challenge to literary scholars and partly because its appearance in PMLA signaled a discipline-wide willingness to engage the topic of globalization and thereby legitimize it as never before. 3 Moreover, implicit in Jay’s argument is the appealing hope that, if the field of literary studies can benefit from a broader engagement with global theory, then it also carries the potential to return the favor by providing a fuller understanding of the historical and cultural dimensions of globalization. In some ways, I consider this project a direct response to Jay’s challenge, insofar as it offers a study of “literature’s relation to the processes of globalization as they manifest themselves” in a particular historical period. Specifically, The Mediating Nation presents a history of the emergence of globalization through an analysis of the literary and public discourse of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America that helped propel the United States into a more powerful and important position in the international community. In the following four chapters, I demonstrate how such authors, politicians, and public intellectuals as Woodrow Wilson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry James, Jack London, and Abraham Cahan developed and articulated fluid conceptions of national identity that could accommodate the United States’ newly formed status as a member of the so-called Great Powers. Recognizing that technology, trade, immigration, and diplomacy were increasingly interconnecting the world’s societies, these and other writers formulated new literary, political, and psychological vocabularies for describing this interconnectedness and its impact upon daily life in America. Consequently, this Cultures of United States Imperialism , ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, and Robert J. Corber’s In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America . 3 In fact, the entire January 2001 issue of PMLA was dedicated to the special topic “Globalizing Literary Studies.” 2 project examines how these writers actively addressed the problems and opportunities of globalization, not only reflecting an awareness of the permeability of their nation’s borders but also devising the political and cultural strategies of U.S. expansionism. In the next