Feeling National, Feeling Global: Class, Sentiment, and American Literary History

Bruce Robbins is prolific and versatile; a comparativist by training, he has written widely about British, French, and American texts. His four monographs represent some of the most compelling attempts I know of, by a US cultural studies scholar, to think through the interrelations of “culture,” politics, class, and what Robbins (following “world system” theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein) terms the “international division of labor” (Robbins, Upward 239). As his Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993) and collections like Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (1993) indicate, Robbins has written frequently on the role of intellectuals in contemporary public culture and has made impassioned, well-reasoned arguments for the political importance of the academic study of literature and culture. I turn to Robbins’s brave and risky work, such as “The Sweatshop Sublime” in PMLA on the complexities of transnational sympathy in the global era, to think about the ethical and political stakes of what I’m doing. If Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999) is impressive for the vigor and clarity of its arguments about contemporary politics, Robbins’s two literary studies showcase his sensitivity, rigor, and imagination as a reader of cultural texts and the sheer breadth of his literary knowledge. Both his earlier work, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986), and, more recently, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (2007), perform a kind of magic feat in resurrecting traditions hidden, as it were, in plain sight—in the former, the recurring appearance, in canonical British fiction, of the highly conventionalized “literary servant” as a figure of/for class; in the latter, an “archive” (he hesitatingly designates it a “genre”) of mobility narratives that comprises the “literary history of the welfare state”—and deftly teases out the complex political import of that tradition. The Servant’s Hand focuses on British fiction, but its central argument—that class and its utopian energies and erotics are registered through the “anachronistic,” “vestigial” character of the literary servant, a “figure of the people’s subordination” (42, 25)—is certainly relevant to American literary history; in its brilliant reading of The Turn of the Screw (1898) and suggestive contextualization of the shaving scene in Benito Cereno (1856), The Servant’s Hand demonstrates how “transatlantic” literary knowledge (not to mention the more robust analysis of class in nineteenth-century British studies more broadly) can shed critical light on the political meanings (and neglected class accents) of nineteenth-century US literature. Given its national focus, The Servant’s Hand was, unsurprisingly, not reviewed in Americanist literary journals, but for its political and theoretical sophistication, its insistence that class matters, and its suggestive linking of class, affect, and sexuality, it ought to have been an important text for Americanists, and it serves as a useful introduction to Robbins’s latest book, which explicitly takes up a wealth of US cultural materials.

Upward Mobility aims to make visible a literary history of the welfare state, centered somewhat surprisingly in a canon of fictional texts about “upward mobility.” Rethinking the “ubiquitous opposition between upward mobility and the welfare state” (think Clarence Thomas and his “welfare queen” sister), Robbins reads these texts not for “narrative claims to hardy independence” and individual self-making but for forms of “hidden sociability”—narrative inscriptions of “collective social advancement” and “social democracy” (what Étienne Balibar terms “social citizenship” [164])—that make “individual narratives of progress” at once possible and intelligible (9). Robbins’s work differs from the approach of Americanists Michael Szalay and Sean McCann, who pursue the linkages between literature and the welfare state by focusing on the New Deal. Following the transatlantic approach of Daniel T. Rodgers, who has charted the shared evolution of the welfare state in Europe and the US, Robbins develops a wide geographic and historical range to glimpse the “slow, diffuse cultural preparation” over the past two centuries, especially the emerging moral and affective “configuration[s...