Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature

Notes

Notes CHAPTER 1 1. Rebecca Harding Davis, Margret Howth: A Story of To-day (1862; repr., New York: Feminist, 1990), 152. Future references will be given parenthetically in text. 2. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xvii. 3. Michael Zuckerman, “The Dodo and the Phoenix: A Fable of American Exceptionalism,” in American Exceptionalism? US Working-Class Formation in an International Context, ed. Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris (New York: St. Martin ’s, 1997), 30. 4. Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 2. 5. Irving Howe, Socialism in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 136. 6. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 79. 7. The amount of work on sympathy and sentimentalism that has come out following Tompkins’s 1985 publication of Sensational Designs, makes any attempt at a bibliographic note provisional at best. Shirley Samuels edited volume The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) is a good starting place. See also Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism : Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). A few scholars have reacted to Tompkins’s optimistic view of sympathy by producing powerful studies that have in›uenced my critique. Central here are Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism: Imagining the Self in Nineteenth -Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) and Amy Schrager Lang’s The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 8. Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility ,” American Historical Review 90 (April 1985): 339–61; 90 (June 1985): 547–66. The quote appears on p. 342. 257 9. Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 24. 10. Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 1. 11. For a discussion of this trend, see Eric Schocket, “Revising the 1930s for the 1990s, or The Work of Art in the Age of Diminished Expectations,” American Quarterly 52 (March 2000): 159–67. Very few scholars have examined the literature of the thirties within the broader context of cross-class labor representation. A notable work of exception is Laura Hapke’s Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). Hapke’s volume is encyclopedic and a wonderful starting place for scholarly research. 12. William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 216–17. 13. Erskine Caldwell, Call It Experience: The Years of Learning How to Write (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1951), 163. 14. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 9. 15. Donna Haraway discusses these dioramas in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 26–58. 16. Quoted in Stott, Documentary Expression, 223. 17. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interuptus: Critical Re›ections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 6. 18. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 61–62. 19. See Mary Poovey, “The Social Construction of ‘Class’: Toward a History of Classi‹catory Thinking,” in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formation , ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 15–56; Peter Calvert, The Concept of Class: An Historical Introduction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), 12–25. 20. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 2, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 928–29. For a cogent explanation of Weber’s theory of class, see Calvert, Concept of Class, 95–114. 21. Williams, Keywords, 61–62. 22. See Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 22. 23. The term struggle concept comes originally from Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London: Zed, 1986), 36. 24. Jean L. Cohen’s Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982) provides a useful introduction to Marx...