Autobiography and the Making of Modernist Multiculturalism A

Autobiography and the Making of Modernist Multiculturalism A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Jessica Lynn Knight IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Paula Rabinowitz August 2011 © Jessica Knight 2011 Acknowledgements It is my great pleasure to thank all of the people who have helped to make this dissertation possible. First, I want to express my gratitude to my adviser, Paula Rabinowitz. As a model of an inventive, engaged, ambitious scholar, Paula has continually inspired me. She has challenged me in ways that have taught me a great deal about my own habits of thinking, and her advice, support, and belief in my project have fueled me from its inception to its completion. I am also incredibly grateful to the rest of my committee for their advice and encouragement. Maria Damon’s enthusiasm, generosity, and kindness have sustained my work in many ways, and I am especially thankful for having had the opportunity to work with Maria on an independent study, which was crucial to the development of my second chapter. Jigna Desai’s wonderful seminar on Asian-American cultural theory inspired me to think more critically about race and identity in relation to cultural production; her insight and perceptive feedback, as well as her warm support, were crucial to me in preparing for my preliminary exams and laying the groundwork for this project. And for his willingness to continue to be involved in my project despite having moved on from the University of Minnesota, I am incredibly grateful to Tom Augst, whose approach to teaching and scholarship has been inspirational to me on many levels. I have benefited enormously fro my work with other faculty members at the University of Minnesota, in studying modernism with Lois Cucullu, American literature with Edward Griffin, cultural theory with Qadri Ismail, British literature with Andrew Elfenbein, femenist theory with Jacqueline Zita, American history with Sara Evans, and nonfiction writing with Patricia Hampl. I thank each of them for not only what they taught me about their subject matter, but for what they taught me through their varied approaches to teaching and academic life. I have also benefited enormously from the students had the pleasure of teaching at the University of Minnesota, who have challenged and inspired me in ways that were fundamental to this project. My work on this dissertation was aided by a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Minnesota, for which I am incredibly grateful. I would also like to thank the English department for two travel grants, which supported conference presentations on key portions of my dissertation, and for nominating me for several other fellowships and awards. Furthermore, chapters two and three would not have come to fruition were it not for the help of the wonderful librarians and archivists at the Wisconsin Historical society—especially their regional center at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls—where I was lucky enough to be able to work with the Samuel Ornitz papers and the American Labor Education Services papers. Likewise, my first chapter benefited from the research librarians at the University of Minnesota’s Wilson Library, who were instrumental in helping me navigate their rich collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century periodicals. Katie Levin has been an invaluable support, both as my supervisor at the University of Minnesota Center for Writing, and as an astute, untiring, and good- humored reader of many drafts of portions of this dissertation. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my dearest friends at the University of Minnesota: Lauren Curtright, Molly i Kelly Gage, Chris Kamerbeek, and Madhurima Chakraborty. They have been the most supportive and inspiring comrades—intellectually and personally—that I could imagine. As readers and as friends, they have seen me through this project from start to finish. I also want to thank my family—my sisters and sister-in-law, brothers-in-law, mother-in- law, and especially, my parents, Susan and Dallas Knight, for their unconditional support and enthusiasm. Finally, my eternal gratitude goes to my husband, Steve Healey, whose love, confidence, and utterly unflagging support was at times the only thing that kept this project moving forward; and to my son, Nico, whose birth was roughly coincidental with the beginnings of this project, and who has made my dissertation-writing years more joyful than he can ever know. ii Table of Contents LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………..iv PREFACE………………………………………………………………………………..1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….4 CHAPTER ONE Mass Magazines, Autobiography, and the New Currency of Difference………21 CHAPTER TWO Passing as Autobiography/Autobiographies of Passing………………………...66 CHAPTER THREE Factory Meets Faculty: Autobiography and Workers’ Education at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers………………………………………… 120 CHAPTER FOUR Coda: Graphic Multiculturalism: Rethinking the Place of Autobiography in Contemporary Literary Pedagogy……………………………………………...168 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………......205 iii List of Figures Fig. 1. Photographs accompanying “Views of an Igorrote Chief,” The Independent 59.2 (Oct. 1905): 779-785……………………………………………………………………..47 Fig. 2. A sample of advertisements from the December 1906 issue of The Independent that appeal to readers’ desire for luxury, elegance, exclusivity, leisure, and culture……58 iv Preface I am part of what was maybe the first generation of American students trained to fully embrace multiculturalism. I was an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh in the mid-nineteen nineties when a more multicultural canon had finally come to greater prominence (however uneasily) in the curriculum. At first, to me as a student—as to most students, I would imagine—this change seemed inevitable and transparent, simply the inclusion of texts that had previously been excluded from courses and anthologies. But my perspective started to change particularly after I came to the University of Minnesota and began teaching. As I developed my own syllabi and looked at anthologies and other people’s syllabi (which I did somewhat obsessively as a new teacher), I kept returning to one central question: why is the new diverse canon so saturated with autobiographical writing? How do life stories, personal accounts, and memoirs function differently in the new canon than fiction and poetry did in the traditional canon? I found that the question of authenticity presented unique intellectual and pedagogical challenges, particularly in the context of multiculturalism. Students tended to read literary texts as somehow directly representative of heretofore excluded social groups, and to expect these texts to make visible certain truths about such groups. I began to speculate about autobiography’s new value in the expanded canon and the multicultural classroom, given its capacity to enhance this sense of an unmediated relationship between the text and the social identity of the author. Moreover, I found that the rich history of autobiographical publication in the United States could provide a 1 meaningful context for the issues I was encountering. I did not want to take up autobiography as a discreet “genre,” or to affirm the primacy of difference in considerations of culture; rather I want to explore how both autobiography and cultural difference, as conceptual categories, interact to through the institutional frameworks that legitimate them. To me this meant conceiving of authorship not just as a space of theoretical possibility, but also as a public role with a history embedded in institutions— institutions that mediate both access to literary authority as well as readers’ processes of meaning-making; it also meant taking seriously the circulation and reception of autobiographical texts, and thinking about texts as material artifacts whose history offers insight into the development of literary culture (and culture in general). Initially, it was the texts themselves that drew me to the early twentieth century— the magazines, fake autobiographies, and workers’ stories that I write about in this dissertation were to my mind both fascinating narratives in themselves and artifacts that spoke to the profound changes occurring within wider U.S. culture—not the least of which was a shift in the concept of culture itself. I landed on the term “modernist multiculturalism” as a way to describe the attitudes and expectations to which many of the texts were responding, and that I saw embodied in their reception and circulation. That concept also offered me a way to think about the connections between the early twentieth century and some of the tendencies that seem to characterize multiculturalism as it has came to be institutionalized at the end of the century. My focus was thus not only on the primary texts, but on attempting to reconstruct how they were embedded in a larger field of cultural production and social reproduction. 2 Each of my first three chapters thus takes up a different venue for the circulation or dissemination of autobiographical texts—though one of the ways I would expand the project would be to also offer a broader portrait of the autobiography publishing landscape, to give a more clear picture of how and where these individual instances fit in. In the epilogue, I connect the history of autobiography and modernist multiculturalism to the issues in contemporary literary studies that

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