Vanishing moments : class and American literature / Eric Schocket.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schocket, Eric, 1966-

Series:

Class, culture.

Class : culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Working class in literature.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (319 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 Americas long engagement with the problem of class stratification and demonstrates how deeply Americas 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 argumentshard-hitting and original. Schocket demonstrates a sophisticated acquaintance with issues within the working-class studies movement. --Barbara Foley, Rutgers University

Contents:

Contents; 1 The Veil and the Vision: Reading Class in American Literature; 2 "Discovering Some New Race": "Life in the Iron Mills," Whiteness, and the Genesis of the American Labor Narrative; 3 Voices of Insurgency: Strikes, Speech, and Social Realism; 4 Middle-Class Melancholy and Proletarian Pain: The Writer as Class Transvestite; 5 Modernism and the Aesthetics of Management: T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein Write Labor Literature; 6 The Fetish of Being Inside: Proletarian Texts and Working-Class Bodies; Notes; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 257-284) and index.

ISBN:

1-282-59766-3

9786612597664

0-472-02570-8

OCLC:

923501914