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Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction
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Dieser Artikel gilt, aufgrund seiner Grösse, beim Versand als 2 Artikel!
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| America's post-World War II prosperity created a boom in higher education, expanding the number of university-educated readers and making a new literary politics possible. Writers began to direct their work toward the growing professional elite, and the American public in turn became more open to literary culture. This relationship imbued fiction with a new social and cultural import, allowing authors to envision themselves as unique cultural educators. It also changed the nature of their work, introducing new strategies of expression and representation to shape this audience.Linking literary and historical trends, Stephen Schryer underscores the exalted fantasies of postwar American writers as they arose from this new conception of their cultural mission. Hoping to cultivate aesthetically attuned professionals who could disrupt the narrow materialism of the bourgeoisie, writers and critics deployed paradox and contradiction, crafting an audience that might transform capitalism from within.
Their exaggeration of intellectual agency wasn't without consequences, however, generating its own cultural fiction, in which America's social reality was nothing more than a tissue of ideas produced by competing elites. Reading Don DeLillo, Marge Piercy, Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ralph Ellison, and Lionel Trilling, among others, Schryer unravels the postwar idea of American literature as a vehicle for instruction& mdash;highlighting the promise and deep flaws inherent in this fantasy. |
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