Books Are Weapons: Didacticism in American Literature, 1890-1945 Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Andrew John Smart Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2017 Dissertation Committee Jared Gardner, Advisor Thomas Davis Elizabeth Hewitt Jesse Schotter 1 Copyrighted by Andrew John Smart 2017 2 Abstract Drawing on New Historicism, Marxist criticism, and rhetorical theory, Books Are Weapons argues for the significance of didacticism throughout the American literary tradition. Marxist critics have long discussed the possibilities that art offers for enacting social change, and rhetoricians have long studied the ways in which texts communicate persuasively. Books Are Weapons brings together these two parallel, but rarely intersecting, forms of inquiry. Books Are Weapons examines an archive of American literary production from the early twentieth century, primarily focusing on novels, but extending to include political pamphlets, autobiographies, poems, and sermons. This diverse set of cultural products allows this project to consider the multitude of ways that artists use their work for instructional purposes. These purposes are similarly diverse, including political persuasion, ethical instruction, and religious conversion. While these functions of literature are infrequently connected, it is my purpose in this project to demonstrate how they share a common didactic impulse, a quality found throughout American literary history. Examining the novels of Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright’s non-fiction work, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s novels, the poetry of James Weldon Johnson, and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, this project examines the multitude of ways that literary texts can teach, inform, and persuade their readers. In this project, works that seek to persuade their ii readers are not understood as manipulative, as is often the critique of didactic literature or protest literature. The focus of this project remains on the techniques and strategies of persuasion deployed by each author. When this project describes a work as didactic, it does so without the implication of simplicity or condescension that some have come to associate with the term. Instead, the goal of this work is to begin an excavation of the American literary tradition that will uncover artifacts of instructional intent throughout literary history, allowing us to better understand the social role of literature. iii Dedication For Casey. iv Acknowledgments I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at The Ohio State University whose assistance and collaboration made this project possible. I would like to thank my parents for instilling a love of learning in me from an early age. Most importantly, I would like to thank my partner Casey for all of her support and understanding which helped to keep me grounded throughout this process. v Vita 2006………………………………………………………… West Bend East High School 2010…………………………………..B.A. English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 2012………………………………….M.A. English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 2012-2017..........................................................Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: English vi Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v Vita ..................................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures .................................................................................................................. viii Chapter 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2. Upton Sinclair, Rhetorical Fiction, and Literary Propaganda ........................ 14 I. Toward a Theory of Literary Propaganda ................................................................. 14 II. Upton Sinclair’s Rhetorical Fictions ........................................................................ 29 III. Speculative Fiction, Deliberative Rhetoric, and the Propaganda of the Future ...... 51 Chapter 3. Coming of Age and Ethics in Wright and Fauset ............................................ 89 I. The Moral of the Story .............................................................................................. 89 II. The Ethics of Living Jim Crow .............................................................................. 105 III. The Morality of “A Novel Without a Moral” ....................................................... 133 Chapter 4. Religion, Persuasion, and the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance ........... 158 I. Religion, Literature, and Education ......................................................................... 158 II. The Sermonic Voice, Authentic Cultural Expression, and the Utility of Religion 160 III. The Preacher in Context: Hurston on Community, Morality, and Oratory .......... 178 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 213 vii List of Figures Figure 1 “Doing the Light and Very Fantastic,” Los Angeles Times ................................ 86 Figure 2 “California Epicklement,” San Francisco News ................................................ 87 Figure 3 “The Fourth Horseman!,” Los Angeles Examiner .............................................. 88 viii Chapter 1. Introduction “Among the greatest means to mental health is knowledge gained from reading didactic literature. Happy is the man who can read and gain some good from all kinds of literature.” From “Reading” in The University Magazine, 1881 In August of 1925, The Saturday Review of Literature published an essay by Virginia Woolf simply titled “American Fiction,” a topic so broad as to almost seem presumptuous. In the essay, Woolf takes up the perspective of the English “tourist,” visiting America through its literary works. From Woolf’s perspective, the tourist wants one thing only: to be able to witness something that she has truly never encountered before. It is by this standard that Woolf’s tourist ultimately finds much of American fiction to be lacking. While there have been skilled writers born in America, their writing seems far too familiar from the English perspective. Many of the American writers who are often held up as the best their country has to offer—including James, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Wharton—Woolf argues, are not Americans at all, suggesting that “they drew their culture from our books.” Instead, they offer only a somewhat inferior imitation of the English style, and “do not give us anything we have not got already” (1). 1 A small number of writers escape at least a part of Woolf's scorn. She deigns to admit that in Walt Whitman's writing, we can see, “the real American undisguised.” Similarly, she finds some value in the writings of Sherwood Anderson and Ring Lardner, whose works do not seek to imitate the English style, but are instead, “resolutely and defiantly American” (1). This is somewhat encouraging to read. Previously, it had seemed that Woolf’s take on American fiction was wholly negative, consisting only of works that failed to meet the English standard. What, then, distinguishes these writers from their peers? True American authors, like Anderson, who have been “Denied…the richness of an old civilization,” seem to succeed mostly on their ability to take America as their subject, and document its humble charms. America, seen through Anderson’s eyes seems, “cheap, it is new, it is ugly, it is made of odds and ends, hurriedly flung together, loosely tied in temporary cohesion” (2). It is at once a provincial scene and one of cold, industrial modernity. Writers like Whitman and Anderson, while “simple and crude” in Woolf’s estimation, are at least not chasing a cultural ideal that is not their own. The praise Anderson receives is coupled with an equal measure of condescension. Woolf suggests that his works are instinctive, sensual, and full of desire, that “in his determination to be ‘true to the essence of things’ he has fumbled his way into something genuine, persistent, of universal significance.” Long before we had a term for it, Virginia Woolf had mastered the art of the backhanded compliment. Those of us who study American fiction may take offense at Woolf’s suggestion, or even ask why we should value the perspective of a British author like Woolf on the field of American literary studies, a national culture which is not her own, and that has 2 been developing steadily in the years since the publication of her essay? One reason for this is the fact that American literary studies have been developing in the shadow of British authors such as Woolf from its inception. Institutional histories such as Gerald Graff’s and Elizabeth Renker’s work have demonstrated the ways in which American literature has remained at the margins of the university until relatively recently. By Renker’s account, the first courses in American literature were deemed impractical, but were scheduled