Copyright 2012 Robert Henn CLASS WORK: NEW YORK INTELLECTUAL LABOR AND THE CREATION OF POSTMODERN AMERICAN FICTION, 1932-1962 BY ROBERT F. HENN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor William J. Maxwell, Chair Professor Michael Bérubé, Director of Research, Pennsylvania State University Professor Robert Dale Parker Associate Professor Kathryn J. Oberdeck Abstract This dissertation argues that American literary postmodernism was profoundly shaped by midcentury intellectual workers’ resistance to the bureaucratization of their labor. An Introduction establishes the significance of the dissertation to debates over both postmodernism and the New York Intellectuals, and summarizes each chapter’s contribution to the overall argument. Part I, “Class Unconsciousness,” then offers three chapters that detail the birth, growth, and eventual eclipse of a theory of “brain workers” as a class in the labor-radical circles of the New York Intellectuals. In the 1930s and 40s, authors Tess Slesinger, Mary McCarthy, and Lionel Trilling sounded an increasingly shrill alarm over what they imagined was a pro- Soviet intellectual class of bureaucratic mental workers in America. I argue that while their class-conscious fictions laid foundations for postmodernism’s arrival decades later, their increasingly indiscriminate hostility toward a class-conscious left nevertheless also hindered later recognition of the intellectual and class origins of postmodernism. Part II, “The Groves of Postmodernism,” begins with an Interlude that offers a theory of the literary and sociological meanings of the postwar campus novel in America. Three final chapters then explain how the antibureaucratic academic fictions of Trilling, McCarthy, and Vladimir Nabokov helped create the characteristic themes and even forms of this emerging genre—and thence of postmodernism itself, whose early canon includes such campus novels as Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) and John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966). I contend that these authors’ liberal satire of academia, influenced by the earlier theory of an intellectual class, was rooted in a passionate desire for intellectuals’ autonomy, and a corresponding critique of their bureaucratic labor in the academy. Thus I argue that the early postmodern, even for such avowedly apolitical writers as Nabokov, may be read as the protest of mental and professional ii workers against the bureaucratic confines of their work. Against recent accusations that postmodernism represented a “libertarian turn” colluding with the New Right, a brief Epilogue then insists on the importance of this early and antibureaucratic postmodernism to the successes of the New Left in the 1960s, as well as to present-day academic workers seeking their own autonomy in a rapidly proletarianizing workplace. This dissertation thus excavates a history of postmodernism’s labor-left origins, thereby challenging familiar accounts of postmodernism’s roots in a 1950s or 1980s political conservatism, as well as notions of the New York Intellectuals’ hostility toward or irrelevance to postmodernism. Along the way, it suggests postmodernism’s continuing relevance to white-collar anxiety and academic activism. iii Acknowledgments As Mary McCarthy knew already in her first book, The Company She Keeps, we are defined by the company we keep, by our relationships with others. I’ve kept excellent company over the years I’ve been writing this dissertation, and all that is good in what follows reflects that. Here I am happy to express my profound gratitude for all who’ve accompanied me. My dissertation committee gets first thanks. It’s hard to know where to begin to thank Bill Maxwell. On the grand side, his course on “Writers as Intellectuals in American Literature” inspired the topic of this dissertation and many of its ideas. Simply put: no Bill, no dissertation. But there’s also the more specialized help he’s given. Bill has taught me modernism high and low. He’s taught me proletarianism of literary and theoretical varieties. He’s taught me to break up sentences like they were so many fights, and he’s taught me to get rid of parentheses and colons (note well: mostly it’s worked). When my graduate employee comrades at the University of Illinois and I were occupying an administrative building for recognition of our union, he brought us a big ol’ bucket of KFC. He is, in short, a great intellectual and political role model. He kept patient when many another advisor might have lost patience altogether, and had faith in the project throughout. Michael Bérubé gave me my first formal introduction to postmodernism, and this covers only the broadest and most direct aspect of his influence on this dissertation. I came to Illinois many years ago largely because I saw someone teaching there who seemed to share my intellectual interests. But I had no idea then how helpful it would be to share that community of interest with someone who had a bigger and more flexible mind, and who allied such formidable traits with a real kindness and generosity. Michael’s life as an intellectual and his reflections on both postmodernism and intellectual life itself have challenged and inspired me. iv I’ve taken more courses with Bob Parker than with any other professor at Illinois, and it’s paid off: he’s made my recalcitrant brain think about literary theory, identity, history, and American literature in nuanced ways, and he’s offered another valuable role model for what a professor—a teacher—could do and be. In one course he introduced me to Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed, which started me on the road to the first chapter. In all my courses with him he’s struggled valiantly to make me write genuinely readable prose. His work never stops in this regard: soon after my defense, he sent me an email that kindly praised the dissertation’s contents and its clarity, but then enumerated with uncanny and alarming skill all the rote phrases that lingered. For every error of thought and expression in what follows, try to imagine four others you were saved from. Then thank him. I gained an interest in American intellectual history through an undergraduate course, but as I entered grad school I wasn’t sure I’d ever pursue the topic again. Taking a fascinating second course on it from Kathy Oberdeck helped push me from this stage of insouciance to my current conviction that I am as much intellectual historian as literary critic. Her course also had a direct effect on this dissertation by introducing me to the scholarly work of Michael Denning, and to the provocative essays of New York Intellectual Dwight Macdonald. She has been unfailingly helpful whenever I’ve asked. Then there are friends. Amihan Huesmann fed and entertained me, keeping me in mind of life outside the dissertation. But she also encouraged me in my work, and aided it. She not only gave me seasoned graph-making advice for my sudden foray into quantitative aspects of the campus novel (see the Interlude), but—and here’s the glory of knowing an atmospheric scientist, for those of you who don’t know—when I fashioned an article from Chapter Four, she researched the New York City weather report for what turns out to have been “a cold, early v winter’s day” in December of 1933. Lionel Trilling coped heroically with highs in the low forties, it turns out. Ellen Samuels, dear friend for nearly two decades, has now become a mentor as well. Between episodes of Deep Space Nine and Mad Men, then, she’s listened to more than her fair share of whining. But she’s also worked on this thing. In particular, when I’d begun to despair of Chapter Three altogether, she generously took it from me and commented in detail on issues both macro and micro, allowing me to patch the chapter together for the first time. She also performed crucial research on the arcana of MLA citation policies as I was preparing part of Chapter Five for publication. Lisa King talked with me about several chapters, watched 1940’s Dance, Girls, Dance (screenplay by Tess Slesinger) with me, and wrote a dissertation that made me want to read Hannah Arendt. She is still one of my cherished models of the passionate and political intellectual. Her influence shows most tellingly in Chapter Five, though she hasn’t seen it and would likely disagree with some of it. Samaa Abdurraqib, Carrie Conners (“my agent,” as I like to call her in honor of her enthusiasm for the project), John Bradley, Xochitl Gilkeson, and Sara Phillips all read and responded to parts of the later chapters and encouraged me in finishing long past when it seemed fruitful to do so. Other friends had less influence on the dissertation’s content, but I wouldn’t have gotten through it without them. Charlie Cooney demonstrated early on in my college years that intellectual ability and interest weren’t synonymous with pretension. Rychetta Watkins offered much encouragement and by her example gave me hope that there was life after the dissertation. Gretchen Soderlund encouraged me early on, as we read Walter Lippmann together. Mark vi Dahlquist frequently housed me in Champaign and made the MLA more enjoyable. Ryan Jerving, Edward Burch, Riley Broach and the others in the Viper and His Famous Orchestra’s stable of musicians and significant others cracked me up and kept me musically informed, if not hep. (Rachel Leibowitz kvetched with the best of them, especially about academic matters.) Toby Higbie listened patiently to a number of oral summaries. Loretta Gaffney chatted with me late into the night as she finished her own dissertation, and really doesn’t deserve to be called what I regularly call her.