Not so Fast

Strada | Not so Fast Michael J. Strada West Liberty State College and West Virginia University Stradamj@wlsvax.wvnet.edu Not so Fast Stanley Corkin. Realism and the Birth ofthe Modem United States: Cinema, Literature, and Culture. The University of Georgia Press, 1996. ($40.00) Cultures matter. Few observations so self-evident to scholars in the 1990's would have seemed so anomalous a century ago. For example, even today's sharp distinction between culture and race was a muddled blur in mainstream U.S. scholarship 100 years ago. Why? The answer comes tightly packaged in Stanley Corkin's ambitious, thorough, and complex intellectual history examining the impact of the realist paradigm on the American experience. This is a study worthy of the oft-abused rubric ofinterdisciplinary, as Corkin delves into literary theory, history, cinema, politics, and last—but certainly not least—economics. Corkin argues that the impulses ofProgressivism (efficiency , scientism, reification, ideological narrowness, compliance , confidence) undergird the world view ofboth the literary and cinematic realist texts of the era and served "to ensure the dominance ofprevailing economic interests." (3) In chapter two he looks at literary realism, as epitomized by William Dean Howells' The Rise ofSilas Lapham (1885), and how it promoted order and continuity congenial to the era's unfettered economic elites. Corkin sees Howells as a cultural elite reflecting the Gilded Age's hidden agenda: controlling irrational human tendencies via hierarchical structures managing limited social change. What bothers Corkin is the class bias behind the seeming objectivity and inevitability ofliterary realism, especially as expressed in The Rise ofSilas Lapham, which he considers "a meditation on the realistic credo" which "misstates the incendiary class conflict ofdie day." (32, 34) Chapter three does a good job of debunking American popular mythology concerning Thomas Edison. In contrast to the image ofEdison the creative inventor, Corkin paints a portrait ofan anti-intellectual industrialist with blindly jingoistic values and a proclivity for reducing people to objects. While the author's assault on Edison approaches overkill, he cogently contends that moving pictures provided the means to embellish extant literary realism by presenting a seemingly higher-order materialist impulse ofthe Gilded Age with a steady diet ofostensible fact in an ideologically neutral manner . Not so fast, says Corkin, because things are often not what common sense suggests. "Like realistic literature, cinema was the product of a class comprising with, or allied with, the Progressive experts who sought to structure American society with their top-down notion oforder." (54) Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) receives the same kind of analysis in chapter four. Corkin considers Dreiser's novel as an expression of literary naturalism, which accepts the basic tenets ofliterary realism, especially the idea that reality is empirical. Corkin believes that Sister Carrie presents a "determinisi vision of social life" and "solidifies social conditions as scientific truths." (104). This puts Dreiser in the same league as Howells and Edison; namely as apologists for a social order self-defined as inexorably scientific , but actually based on norms profoundly beneficial to the elites sitting comfortably on top of the social heap. Edwin S. Porter, immortalized in film history as the creator ofediting, worked for the Edison Company at a time when it had a virtual monopoly over the medium. Porter was important in the early 1900's, a time, according to Corkin, when the American cinema "rapidly adopted the institutional structure of corporate capitalism." (105) Edwin Porter enjoyed success as a filmmaker. Two ofhis big films, The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Life ofan American Fireman (1903), are described by Corkin as objectifying characters of the narrative in ways comparable to Dreiser's novel, Sister Carrie. In Porter's films, the narrative problems are expressed as a robbery and a fire. Social organization, as public institutions (police and fire departments respectively), solves the problem in each case by exercising control over chaotic forces. The result was just what America was looking for: a fiction of the real in an age intent on reification. Chapter six inhabits controversial terrain by venturing into the complexities of D. W Griffith's The Birth ofa Nation (1915). Corkin takes issue with the conventional wisdom among film critics who contend that, while...