E-Book Overview
Vanishing Moments analyzes how various American authors have reified class through their writing, from the first influx of industrialism in the 1850s to the end of the Great Depression in the early 1940s. Eric Schocket uses this history to document America’s long engagement with the problem of class stratification and demonstrates how deeply America’s desire to deny the presence of class has marked even its most labor-conscious cultural texts. Schocket offers careful readings of works by Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, Jack London, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Muriel Rukeyser, and Langston Hughes, among others, and explores how these authors worked to try to heal the rift between the classes. He considers the challenges writers faced before the Civil War in developing a language of class amidst the predominant concerns about race and slavery; how early literary realists dealt with the threat of class insurrection; how writers at the turn of the century attempted to span the divide between the classes by going undercover as workers; how early modernists used working-class characters and idioms to shape their aesthetic experiments; and how leftists in the 1930s struggled to develop an adequate model to connect class and literature. Vanishing Moments’ unique combination of a broad historical scope and in-depth readings makes it an essential book for scholars and students of American literature and culture, as well as for political scientists, economists, and humanists.Eric Schocket is Associate Professor of American Literature at Hampshire College.“An important book containing many brilliant arguments—hard-hitting and original. Schocket demonstrates a sophisticated acquaintance with issues within the working-class studies movement.” --Barbara Foley, Rutgers University
E-Book Content
VANISHING MOMENTS
CLASS : CULTURE
SERIES EDITORS
Amy Schrager Lang, Syracuse University, and
Bill V. Mullen, Purdue University
EDITORIAL BOARD
Nicholas Bromell, University of Massachusetts
Nan Enstad, University of Wisconsin
Amy Gluckman, Dollars and Sense
Leslie Harris, Emory University
Cora Kaplan, University of Southampton
Louis Mendoza, University of Minnesota
Jonathan Prude, Emory University
Steven Ross, University of Southern California
Cecelia Tichi, Vanderbilt University
Lisa Yun, Binghamton University
Alan Wald, University of Michigan
Janet Zandy, Rochester Institute of Technology
TITLES IN THE SERIES:
The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America
Amy Schrager Lang
Vanishing Moments: Class and American Culture
Eric Schocket
Vanishing Moments
Class
AND
American Literature
Eric Schocket
The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor
For
Alison, Ben, & Margot
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2006
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
O Printed on acid-free paper
2009 2008 2007 2006
4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schocket, Eric, 1966-
Vanishing moments : class and American literature / Eric Sch
p. cm. - (Class :culture)
Includes bibliographical refe