The Sentimental Touch: The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism

3 /Holding On to the Sentimentalin Winesburg, Ohio

Chapter 3 examines Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a text that was written when managerial capitalism was in full emergence, and when the literary influence of the American sentimental novel seemed to be in full decline. In Winesburg, Ohio, what seems to be at first a full repudiation of the sentimental tradition becomes an appropriation of sentimental form. Even in a society where bodies appear to be isolated beyond resolve, the sentimental touch remains the only successful mode of communication. Anderson's deployment of the sentimental touch shows us that American modernism-despite its aspirations-is not a full rupture from the past. Indeed, the persistence of the sentimental trope in an unsentimental world signals the ossification of literary structure alongside the hardening of bureaucratic frameworks. The chapter argues that Anderson's use of an atavistic trope marks his vexed relationship with the pressures of managerialism.