Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans

Notes

N o t e s Introduction 1. This is in fact what Joel Pfister sees as therapeutic discourse’s central function , which he describes in his essay, “Glamorizing the Psychological.” 2. The most important critic to make this claim is Frederic Jameson, who repeatedly laments the psychological emphasis of twentieth-century fiction in The Political Unconscious. Richard Ohmann has also argued that, in its efforts to serve the interests of the professional managerial class, successful contemporary American fiction tends to focus on “individual consciousness” and private life to the exclusion of political issues (210). In her exploration of postwar best sellers, The American Dream, Elizabeth Long notes the emphasis on personal psychology in contemporary fiction, though she contends that this emphasis need not preclude the articulation of political and sociological insights. 3. Numerous sociologists have pointed to the various social purposes that literature serves. In Book Clubs, for instance, Elizabeth Long attempts to debunk the myth of the “solitary reader” (2), pointing to the community-building function of literature. 4. See Dwight Macdonald; Leslie Fiedler, “The Middle Against Both Ends”; John Guillory, “The Ordeal of Middlebrow Culture.” 5. For a history of the origins of middlebrow culture in the United States, see Joan Shelley Rubin. See also Janice Radway, Feeling and Kenneth Davis. 6. See Macdonald, Against the American Grain; Fiedler, “The Middle Against Both Ends.” 7. Thomas Schaub captures this perceived narrowness succinctly: “When analysts of the cold war in the United States write of a ‘consensus’ culture, they mean that a collaboration of business, government, and labor established a dominant center which either saw no need for extreme or divisive positions or actively worked to suppress them” (137). 8. David Riesman, with his description of the “other-directed” individual, and William Whyte, with his analysis of the “organization man,” were the two most famous critics to make this claim. C. Wright Mills reached similarly troubling conclusions. 210 : notes to pages 5–14 9. The editors of Partisan Review opened the symposium with the statement: “Politically, there is a recognition that the kind of democracy which exists in America has an intrinsic and positive value: it is not merely a capitalist myth but a reality which must be defended against Russian totalitarianism. The cultural consequences are bound to be far-reaching and complex, but some of them have already become apparent. For better or worse, most writers no longer accept alienation as the artist’s fate in America; on the contrary, they want very much to be a part of American life.” See Partisan Review 19.3 (1952): 284. 10. See Albert Greco et al.; Rahlee Hughes, 12; Greco, “Shaping the Future.” 11. See Hughes, 13; Andre Schriffin, 123; Jim Milliot, 8. 12. In understanding these trends, I am indebted to Joelle Delbourgo, a literary agent who kindly agreed to be interviewed. See also John Tebbel; Schriffin; Jason Epstein. 13. See Hughes; Tatiana Hutton. 14. The most famous examples of reader-response criticism are Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser. See also Jane Tompkins’s edited collection: Reader-Response Criticism. 15. Her arguments about middlebrow readers appear in “The Book-of-TheMonth Club and the General Reader” and A Feeling for Books. See also Andrew Ross; Susan Bordo. 16. For some good examples of work that has participated in and/or reflected upon this debate, see Robert McChesney; Nicholas Garnham; Lawrence Grossberg ; Michael Berúbé. 17. For some critical texts that have tried to characterize different facets of the American middle class in the past fifty years, see Catherine Jurca; Mary PattilloMcCoy ; Barbara Ehrenreich; T. J. Jackson Lears; Christopher Lasch; Scott Donaldson ; John Galbraith; Whyte; A. C. Spectorsky; Mills; Riesman. 18. Both Elizabeth Long (in The American Dream) and Ohmann assert the centrality and influence of professional middle-class audiences within the American literary scene. 19. See for instance Elizabeth Long, The American Dream, 48. See also “Over One-Third,” Harris Poll. 20. See Caleb Crain; Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler; Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis. 21. Rita Felski makes a similar point in “After Suspicion.” 22. Cecilia Farr and Jaime Harker observe that Oprah’s Book Club often brings the two (emotion and intellect) into dialogue: “While critics have suggested that focusing on emotional (or, in Farr’s formulation, empathetic) response is to be immersed in a therapeutic, as opposed to a literary, environment, Oprah’s Book Club regularly uses novels as a way to link emotion and intellect. Indeed, the very no- notes to pages 14–20 : 211...