The Amis-Eagleton controversy
The British literary elite and the “war on terror”
By Ann Talbot
In giving Eagleton a kicking, the British literary elite are sending a message to younger and less well-established academics, to aspiring writers and to students that Marxism is not acceptable and that they had better adopt the same degenerate stance as Amis if they expect to be published, get promoted or be awarded any grade above a gamma minus.
“What’s Wrong With the American Essay” is a thoughtful essay by Cristina Nehring on the state and nature of “The Best American Essays” and their like, though in the paragraph below she leaves unclear the state and nature of the short story:
Continue reading Cristina Nehring, the American Essay, and Fiction
Thinking About New Orleans: Kim Sykes
Q. Tell me about the writing of fiction you have written since Katrina.
A. There is little room for nonsense, beating around the bush, sort to speak. I get straight to the point. My characters say what they mean and mean what they say.Continue reading Kim Sykes and Artistic Consciousness Post Katrina
(1928) “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world…. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine. I am aware that the word ‘propaganda’ carries to many minds an unpleasant connotation. Yet whether, in any instance, propaganda is good or bad depends upon the merit of the cause urged, and the correctness of the information published. In itself, the word ‘propaganda’ has certain technical meanings which, like most things in this world, are ‘neither good nor bad but custom makes them so.’ I find the word defined in Funk and Wagnalls’ Dictionary in four ways: …‘ “Propaganda” in its proper meaning is a perfectly wholesome word, of honest parentage, and with an honorable history…’ “
–Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda
(1928) “Propaganda itself is preferable to shallow, truckling imitation. Negro things may reasonably be a fad for others; for us they must be a religion. Beauty, however, is its best priest and psalms will be more effective than sermons.”
–Alain Locke, “Art or Propaganda?” African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 (Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed.)
(1931) “I believe therefore that the time is at hand when these writers, who have largely dominated the literary world of the decade 1920-30, though we shall continue to admire them as masters, will no longer serve us as guides. …the private imagination in isolation from the life of society seems to have been exploited and explored as far as for the present is possible. Who can imagine this sort of thing being carried further than Valéry and Proust have done? And who hereafter will be content to inhabit a corner, though fitted out with some choice things of one’s own, in the shuttered house of one of these writers—where we find ourselves, also, becoming conscious of a lack of ventilation?
“The reaction against nineteenth-century naturalism which Symbolism originally represented has probably now run its full course, and the oscillation which for at least three centuries has been taking place between the poles of objectivity and subjectivity may return toward objectivity again: we may live to see Valéry, Eliot and Proust displaced and treated with as much intolerance as those writers—Wells, France and Shaw—whom they have themselves displaced. Yet as surely as Ibsen and Flaubert brought to their Naturalistic plays and novels the sensibility and language of Romanticism, the writers of a new reaction in the direction of the study of man in his relation to his neighbor and to society will profit by the new intelligence and technique of Symbolism. Or—what would be preferable and is perhaps more likely—this oscillation may finally cease. Our conceptions of objective and subjective have unquestionable been based on false dualisms; our materialisms and idealisms alike have been derived from mistaken conceptions of what the researches of science implied—Classicism and Romanticism, Naturalism and Symbolism are, in reality, therefore false alternatives. …our ideas about the ‘logic’ of language are likely to be very superficial. The relation of words to what they convey—that is, to the processes behind them and the processes to which they give rise in those who listen to or read them—is still a very mysterious one. We tend to assume that being convinced of things is something quite different from having them suggested to us; but the suggestive language of the Symbolist poet is really performing the same sort of function as the reasonable language of the realistic novelist or even the severe technical languages of science” (231-234)
–Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle
(1932) “Genuine proletarian criticism has seldom sought to deny the importance of literary values because of its desire for social significances. On the contrary, except in the United States, revolutionary critics have often been harder taskmasters from the point of literary quality than aesthetic critics…. The revolutionary critic should demand as much of the art he endorses as the reactionary [critic]. No revolutionary critic, for example, should deny that art in itself, in whatever form, is a trade just as pottery-making is, and as a trade it has its technique which has to be mastered if that which is produced is to be worthwhile.”
“Revolutionary art has to be good art first before it can have deep meaning, just as apples in a revolutionary country as well as in a reactionary country have to be good apples before they can be eaten with enjoyment. The fact that the pottery or the apples are the products of a revolutionary culture—that is, made or grown by revolutionists—does not itself, or by any kind of special magic, make them good. It simply gives them a new form of ideological identification….
“[Great revolutionary] films are great not because they are [only progressive in ideology] but because they are great first in their formal organization, and then greater still because of the social purpose which they serve. The revolutionary proletarian critic does not aim to underestimate literary craftsmanship. What he contends is simply that literary craftsmanship is not enough. The craftsmanship must be utilized to create objects of revolutionary meaning. Only through this synthesis does the revolutionary critic believe that art can serve its most important purpose today. Revolutionary meanings without literary craftsmanship constitute as hopeless a combination from the point of view of the radical critic as literary craftsmanship without revolutionary purpose. If proletarian literature fails in so many instances in America, it is not because it is propagandistic—most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another, including even that of William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw—but because it is lacking in qualities of craftsmanship.
“In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape. …Proletarian writers are not necessarily proletarians…but they are writers who are imbued with a proletarian ideology instead of a bourgeois one. They are writers who have adopted the revolutionary point of view of the proletarian ideology in their work. That often they fail in such expression is inevitable in a transitional stage of society in which we are living in today.
“This much should be clear, however, and that is that proletarian writers are not to be confused with literary rebels. Literary rebels believe in revolt in literature; left-wing, that is proletarian, writers believe in revolt in life. The literary rebels, for example, who became the advocates of free verse as opposed to conventional verse must not be associated with proletarian writers, who are opposed to the society in which we live and aim to devote their literature to its transformation. Proletarian writers, then, are more interested in social revolt than in literary revolt. As a group they are convinced that present-day industrial society is based upon exploitation and injustice; that it creates distress and misery for the many and brings happiness only to the few; that its dedication to the ideal of profit instead of use is destructive of everything fine and inspiring in life; and that until its private-property basis is destroyed and replaced by the social control of all property, the human race will never be able to escape the horrors of unemployment, poverty, and war. More than that, proletarian writers believe that their literature can serve a greater purpose only when it contributes, first, toward the destruction of present-day society, and, second, toward the creation of a new society which will embody…a social, instead of an individualistic ideal. Unlike Ibsen, they do not ask questions and then refuse to answer them. Unlike the iconoclasts, they are not content to tear down the idols and stop there. Their aim is to answer questions as well as ask them, and to provide a new order to replace an old one. Their attitude, therefore, is a positive instead of a negative one” (459-462).
–V.F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature
(1934) “The moral office and human function of art can be intelligently discussed only in context of culture. A particular work of art may have a definite effect upon a particular person or upon a number of persons. The social effect of the novels of Dickens or of Sinclair Lewis is far from negligible. But a less conscious and more massed constant adjustment of experience proceeds from the total environment that is created by the collective art of a time…” (344). “The theories that attribute direct moral effect and intent to art fail because they do not take account of the collective civilization that is the context in which works of art are produced and enjoyed. I would not say that they tend to treat works of art as a kind of sublimated Aesop’s fables. But they all tend to extract particular works, regarded as especially edifying, from their milieu and to think of the moral function of art in terms of a strictly personal relation between the selected works and a particular individual. Their whole conception of morals is so individualistic that they miss a sense of the way in which art exercises its humane functions. Matthew Arnold’s dictum that ‘poetry is a criticism of life’ is a case in point…” (346).
–John Dewey, Art as Experience
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(1934) “In one issue of the New York Times—May 10, 1933—we learned from the Mexican Bolshevik artist, Diego Rivera, that ‘art which is not propaganda is not art at all,’ and from Hitler’s Minister of Education that ‘it is no longer art for art’s sake in Germany, but art for propaganda’s sake—otherwise it is not art.’ The German Bolshevik artist, George Grosz, had already declared that ‘The artist of our day, if he does not want to be an empty runner…can choose only between technique and class-struggle propaganda.’ And Mussolini recently expressed the same view by refusing to open the Style Show at Turin until all the slim girls in the mural had been washed down, and issuing an instruction to the press to accept for publication only such representations of the female figure as exemplify the ‘fully developed bust and hips appropriate to the fascist girl and mother.’ It seems well agreed on both sides of the barricades, that in the future at least art is to be crudely purposive, and the artist’s prestige to depend upon his service to a social or political cause” (3-4).
–Max Eastman, Art and the Life of Action
(1935) “To characterize an essay or a book as a political pamphlet is neither to praise nor to condemn it. Such pamphlets have their place in the world. In the case of the liberal critic, however, we have a political pamphlet which pretends to be something else. We have an attack on the theory of art as a political weapon which turns out to be itself a political weapon…. The liberal critic, the Man in White, wants us to believe that when you write about the autumn wind blowing a girl’s hair or about ‘thirsting breasts,’ you are writing about ‘experience’; but when you write about the October Revolutions, or the Five Year Plan, or the lynching of Negroes in the South, or the San Francisco strike you are not writing about ‘experience.’ Hence to say; ‘bed your desire among the pressing grasses’ is art; while Roar China, Mayakovsky’s poems, or the novels of Josephine Herbst and Robert Cantwell are propaganda …. If you were to take a worker gifted with a creative imagination and ask him to set down his experience honestly, it would be an experience so remote from that of the bourgeois that the Man in White would, as usual, raise the cry of ‘propaganda’ ” (9-12).
–Joseph Freeman in Proletarian Literature in the United States, Granville Hicks, Ed., et. al.
(1936) “I think that literature must be viewed both as a branch of the fine arts and as an instrument of social influence. It is this duality, intrinsic to literature, that produces unresolved problems of literary criticism” (3).
“I suggest that in the field of literature the formula ‘All art is propaganda’ be replaced by another: ‘Literature is an instrument of social influence’…. [Literature] can be propaganda—in the more limited sense of my definition of propaganda; and it can sometimes perform an objective social function that approaches agitation. However, it often performs neither of these functions and yet does perform an objective social function… I am making these distinctions on the grounds of strategy and clarity, so that we may know what we are doing and what we are talking about. A leading critical confusion—as I have said—has arisen from using the word propaganda in various senses; then from hitching literature sometimes to one; sometimes to another, of these meanings; and finally from thinking that we have always had the same meanings in mind and that these meanings exhaust the roles that literature plays objectively in society, and subjectively upon the individual consciousness of the reader. In so doing, we have produced wasted polemics; and in confronting critics who oppose Marxism, revolutionary criticism has led with its chin; is it any wonder that opponents have leaped at it when such opportunities were offered?” (169-171).
–James T. Farrell, “Literature and Propaganda,” in A Note on Literary Criticism
(1939) “Socialist criticism in America may conveniently be dated from the founding of the Comrade—‘An Illustrated Socialist Monthly’—in 1901…. The Comrade appeared at the beginning of the muckrake era. It was superior to the muckrakers in the clarity of its vision as to the basic cause of social evils and the way to cure them…. The aims of socialist critics were propagandistic, and it was inevitable that they should be paramount in a time when American critical systems were divided between art for art’s sake, art for morality’s sake, and various compromises between those two exhausted theories of esthetic purpose.1 Consider the essays and lectures on the contemporary theatre by the anarchist Emma Goldman. Miss Goldman made no bones about her intentions. Her essay on ‘The Modern Drama’ in Anarchism and Other Essays (1911) was frankly a salute to its subject as an instrument for the dissemination of radical thought.”
(1“ ‘propaganda’ is not used here as an invidious term. It is used to describe works consciously written to have an immediate and direct effect upon their readers’ opinions and actions, as distinguished from works that are not consciously written for that purpose or which are written to have a remote and indirect effect. It is possible that conventional critics have learned by now that to call a literary work ‘propaganda’ is to say nothing about its quality as literature. By now enough critics have pointed out that some of the world’s classics were originally ‘propaganda’ for something”) (289-292).
“The socialist’s affinity with realism was stated forcefully in the leading editorial of the Masses in February 1911—the second issue of a magazine…which was a successor, on a more mature and ‘politicalized’ level, to the Comrade. It said: ‘It is natural that Socialists should favor the novel with a purpose, more especially, the novel that points a Socialist moral. As a reaction against the great bulk of vapid, meaningless, too-clever American fiction, with its artificial plots and characters remote from actual life, such an attitude is a healthy sign …’ ”(289-290).
“Its militancy is the most obvious characteristic of American criticism since the war. In the whole of nineteenth century there was only one critic, Poe, who was deliberately and consistently disputatious. No one else made polemics the basis of a critical method. Whitman was a maverick, but he was exclamatory rather than argumentative. Now, however, it is customary for critics to be bellicose, and there are few who have let politeness stand in the way of controversy. The reason is not hard to find. Criticism in our time has been largely a war of traditions—a struggle between irreconcilable ideologies…” (302).
“The academy was growing up. It was beginning to share the emotions of serious adults who were trying to adjust themselves to an America become rich and imperialistic. In its own special field, literary history, it was beginning to achieve mature and realistic interpretations. In 1927 it came of age: V. L. Parrington, professor of English at the University of Washington, published the two completed volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought. With that work the academy was at last brought face to face with the ideas, sentiments, and historical methods of today…. Parrington’s Main Currents arrived to supply the most needed things: an account of our literary history which squared with recent works on the history of our people and a realistic technique for analyzing the relationship of a writer to his time and place—in addition to a militantly progressive spirit. Professorial and literary circles had consciously been waiting for such a work, and if the one that did come forth was far more radical than some people cared for, it simply could not be rejected. The author was a professor too; his scholarship defied scrutiny; and his ideas were couched in terms that were native American, most of them having come over shortly after the Mayflower. One must emphasize Parrington’s radicalism because it is probably the most significant aspect of his work. He sharpened, gave point to the economic interpretation of literary movements because of his desire to reveal the motivating interests and real direction of specific works of literature… (330-331).
“There was one critic who apparently possessed all the virtues—fine taste, poetic sensitiveness, intellectuality, an experimental inclination. His literary scholarship was beyond dispute, his writing deft and memorable. He was, moreover, a poet of the first rank, which gave his criticism of the art an extraordinary authority. He was universally respected: by Pound, by the later expatriates, by the impressionists of the Dial, by the Hound and Horn group. This critic was T. S. Eliot. His volume of essays, The Sacred Wood, published in 1920, is still considered to be one of the truly distinguished works of esthetic criticism produced in this century…. The reader will note that he is here described in the past tense. His works are many now, but The Sacred Wood alone is a consideration of esthetic problems. In the rest the emphasis is on the esthetic effects of moral and social beliefs. His development is one of the ‘consequences’ touched upon in the following chapter…. (358-359).
“[T.S. Eliot wrote,] ‘There are two and only two finally tenable hypotheses about life: the Catholic and the materialistic [i.e., Marxist]. It is quite possible, of course, that the future may bring neither a Christian nor a materialistic civilization. It is quite possible that the future may be nothing but chaos or torpor. In that event, I am not interested in the future; I am only interested in the two alternatives which seem to me worthier of interest….’ Eliot chose not only the Catholic hypothesis, but also its political corollaries. His literary opinions were thus given a firm philosophical base to rest upon, and from that fact he drew the reasonable conclusions…[that] ‘Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is then more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.’ To this has esthetic criticism at last come—to a realization that non-esthetic criteria are the ultimate tests of value. Whether they be called philosophical, moral, or social criteria, they are still the ideas that men have about the way human beings live together and the way they ought to live. The quest of beauty had become the quest of reality. It had become, in essence, literary criticism as socially conscious and as polemical as the criticism of the Marxists….
“Eliot spoke of alternatives, not of choices…. He believes that one of the alternatives has greater value, is nobler, is in a sense more real, than the other. The question is therefore not simply one of personal taste. It is a question of evidence and reason. But the alternative he favors admits of no evidence and derogates from reason. His philosophy is, in the last analysis, wholly mystical. It is not capable of being tested and verified and improved. The alternative he rejects is, on the other hand, the one that is favored by those who are determined to be as scientific as one can be in a non-physical field. The literary criticism of the neo-classicists is a criticism composed of obiter dicta inspired by intangible emotions. The literary criticism of the materialists stands or falls by the findings of the social scientists, psychologists, and historians. Eliot’s alternative involves a revulsion against democracy; the materialists are partisans of democracy. The literary criticism of his school tends to create a literature that will express the sensibilities and experiences of a few fortunate men. The criticism of the opposing school tends to create a literature that will express the ideals and sympathies of those who look forward to the conquest of poverty, ignorance, and inequality—to the material and intellectual elevation of the mass of mankind….”
“To whom does the future belong? In January 1939 Eliot announced that the Criterion, the literary journal he had edited since 1922, would no longer be published. His Europe had crumbled; the culture in which he had put his faith was dying. The Criterion had served its purpose. Eliot had arrived at a mood of detachment. There was nothing he could hopefully fight for now. But those who believe in scientific methods, in realism, in social equality and democracy, are hopeful and are fighting.” (384-387)
–Bernard Smith, Forces in Literary Critcism
(1940) “The propaganda novel is quite simply a story with a purpose. Not that every novel may not be interpreted as a story with a purpose; but there are some authors whose educative mission burns so ardently within them that it becomes impossible to consider any kind of writing save that of direct entreaty. There is little masking of the challenge. The banners flutter, the trumpets blare. The slogan flies to its appointed target. ‘And now, men and women of America,’ cries Mrs. Beecher Stowe, at the conclusion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘is this [slavery] a thing to be trifled with, apologized for, and passed over in silence? Farmers of Massachusetts, of New Hampshire, of Vermont, of Connecticut, who read this book by the blaze of your winter-evening fire; strong-hearted, generous sailors and shipowners of Maine—is this a thing for you to countenance and encourage?’ Such is the voice of the authentic propagandist. The pointed moral, and a tale adorned thereby.”
“It would be erroneous to suppose, however, that every type of propagandist found a field so favourable for opportunity as Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. All too often in history the reformer has been compelled to clothe his meaning in parable and allegory. This was Rabelais’s method in dealing with the corruption of the mediaeval Church, and that of Swift and Voltaire with the vileness of eighteenth-century government. The heavy-witted saw only the facile story: the man of critical intelligence the rapier point beneath.”
“The propaganda story, then, from sheer pressure of events, may shape itself to the half-concealed, the oblique approach. Perhaps the most famous example of this method is to be found in Nicolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. Primarily, Dead Souls is as much concerned with the problem of chattel slavery as Uncle Tom’s Cabin; but Gogol’s treatment is as far removed from that of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe as the timber profusion of eighteenth-century Moscow from the primly ordered architecture of Hartford, Connecticut…”
“How many real Socialists did [Upton Sinclair’s] The Jungle make? It is difficult to say. Very few indeed, if municipal elections between 1906 and 1936 count for anything. But perhaps the sum total of literary influence cannot be assessed by the mathematical habit. That Charles Dickens assisted the reform of the Poor Law, and Charles Reade that of the Victorian prison system, is undeniable; but exact measurement is beyond the reach of even the most ardent of social investigators. Such novels influence; but downright conversion is another matter. It is doubtful indeed if a novel of propaganda ever really converted anyone. That it may emphasize an atmosphere in which conversion becomes possible is perhaps as far as the Plain Man would care to go” (35-46).
–Roger Dataller, The Plain Man and the Novel
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(1941) “The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps the finest example we have so far produced in the United States of the proletarian novel. This is a somewhat loose term to designate the type of novel that deals primarily with the life of the working classes or with any social or industrial problem from the point of view of labor. There is likely to be a considerable element of propaganda in any novel with such a theme and such a point of view. And it often happens that the spirit of propaganda does not carry with it the philosophical breadth, the imaginative power, or the mere skill in narrative which are so important for the production of a work of art. Upton Sinclair is an example of a man of earnest feeling and admirable gifts for propaganda who has not the mental reach of a great artist nor the artist’s power of telling a plausible story and creating a world of vivid and convincing people. One sometimes has the feeling with Sinclair that he starts with a theory and then labors to create characters who will prove it; that his interest in the people is secondary. And that is a bad start with a writer of fiction” (327).
–Joseph Warren Beach, “Art and Propaganda,” American Fiction: 1920-1940
(1941) “Here I shall put down, as briefly as possible, a statement in behalf of what might be catalogued, with a fair degree of accuracy, as a sociological criticism of literature. Sociological criticism is certainly not new. I shall try to suggest what partially new elements or emphasis I think should be added to this old approach. And to make the ‘way in’ as easy as possible, I shall begin with a discussion of proverbs. Examine random specimens in The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. You will note, I think, that there is no ‘pure’ literature here. Everything is ‘medicine.’ Proverbs are designed for consolation or vengeance, for admonition or exhortation, for foretelling” (253).
–Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” The Philosophy of Literary Form
(1941) “The present article proposes to say something further on the subject of art and propaganda. It will attempt to set forth a line of reasoning as to why the contemporary emphasis must be placed largely upon propaganda, rather than upon ‘pure’ art…. Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable. And if it leads us to a state of acquiescence at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question, we get a paradox whereby the soundest adjunct to ethics, the aesthetic, threatens to uphold an unethical condition. For this reason it seems that under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art. Art cannot safely confine itself to merely using the values which arise out of a given social texture and integrating their conflicts, as the soundest, ‘purest’ art will do. It must have a definite hortatory function, an educational element of suasion or inducement; it must be partially forensic. Such a quality we consider to be the essential work of propaganda. Hence we feel that the moral breach arising from vitiation of the work-patterns calls for a propaganda art. And incidentally, our distinction as so stated should make it apparent that much of the so-called ‘pure’ art of the nineteenth century was of a pronouncedly propagandist or corrective coloring. In proportion as the conditions of economic warfare grew in intensity throughout the ‘century of progress,’ and the church proper gradually adapted its doctrines to serve merely the protection of private gain and the upholding of manipulated law, the ‘priestly’ function was carried on by the ‘secular’ poets, often avowedly agnostic.
“Our thesis is by no means intended to imply that ‘pure’ art or ‘acquiescent’ art should be abandoned. There are two kinds of ‘toleration.’ Even if a given state of affairs is found, on intellectualistic grounds, to be intolerable, the fact remains that as long as it is with us we must more or less contrive to ‘tolerate’ it. Even though we might prefer to alter radically the present structure of production and distribution through the profit motive, the fact remains that we cannot so alter it forthwith. Hence, along with our efforts to alter it, must go the demand for an imaginative equipment that helps to make it tolerable while it lasts. Much of the ‘pure’ or acquiescent art of today serves this invaluable psychological end. For this reason the great popular comedians or handsome movie stars are rightly the idols of the people. Likewise the literature of sentimentality, however annoying and self-deceptive it may seem to the hardened ‘intellectual,’ is following in a direction basically so sound that one might wish more of our pretentious authors were attempting to do the same thing more pretentiously. On the other hand, much of the harsh literature now being turned out in the name of the ‘proletariat’ seems inadequate on either count. It is questionable as propaganda, since it shows us so little of the qualities in mankind worth saving. And it is questionable as ‘pure’ art, since by substituting a cult of disaster for a cult of amenities it ‘promotes our acquiescence’ to sheer dismalness. Too often, alas, it serves as a mere device whereby the neuroses of the decaying bourgeois structure are simply transferred to the symbols of workingmen. Perhaps more of Dickens is needed, even at the risk of excessive tearfulness” (271-278)
–Kenneth Burke, “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism,” The Philosophy of Literary Form
(1942) “Our modern literature was rooted in those dark and still little-understood years of the 1880’s and 1890’s when all America stood suddenly, as it were, between one society and another, one moral order and another, and the sense of impending change became almost oppressive in its vividness. It was rooted in the drift to the new world of factories and cities, with their dissolution of old standards and faiths; in the emergence of the metropolitan culture that was to dominate the literature of the new period; in the Populists who raised their voices against the domineering new plutocracy in the East and gave so much of their bitterness to the literature of protest rising out of the West; in the sense of surprise and shock that led to the crudely expectant Utopian literature of the eighties and nineties, the largest single body of Utopian writing in modern times, and the most transparent in its nostalgia. But above all was it rooted in the need to learn what the reality of life was in the modern era. In a word, our modern literature came out of those great critical years of the late nineteenth century which saw the emergence of modern America, and was molded in its struggles…. We live in a day when the brilliance of some of our critics seems to me equaled only by their barbarism. In my study in Chapter XIV of the twin fanaticisms that have sought to dominate criticism in America since 1930—the purely sociological and the purely textual-‘esthetic’ approach—I have traced some of the underlying causes for the aridity, the snobbery, the sheer human insensitiveness that have weighted down so much of the most serious criticism of our day….” (viii-xi).
–Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds
(1943) “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trouser in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”
–George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press” (Excerpt from the suppressed preface to Animal Farm; published 1972 in the Times Literary Supplement, also 1993, in the Everyman’s Library edition of Animal Farm)
(1949) “In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that cornerstone of American social protest fiction…speaking for the author…Miss Ophelia and St. Clare are terribly in earnest. Neither of them questions the medieval morality from which their dialogue springs: black, white, the devil, the next world—posing its alternatives between heaven and the flames—were realities for them as, of course, they were for their creator…. Mrs. Stowe’s novel, achieves a bright, almost a lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a witch. This is the more striking as one considers the novels of Negro oppression writers in our own, more enlightened day, all of which say only: ‘This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!’ (Let us ignore, for the moment, those novels of oppression written by Negroes, which add only a raging, near-paranoiac postscript to this statement and actually reinforce, as I hope to make clear later, the principles which activate the opposition they decry.)” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteousness, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty; Uncle Tom’s Cabin—like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants—is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe’s subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.” “But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe’s powers; she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still within the same constriction. How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth?” “[…] In Native Son, Bigger is Uncle Tom’s descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses…. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”
–James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Notes of a Native Son, 1955; American Literature, American Culture, 1999
(1950) “How should Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Germinal, and Mary Barton be classified? As proletarian literature? If Gentleman’s Agreement is a problem novel what is Daniel Deronda? Jack London may be a proletarian writer but his most famous book The Call of the Wild is an adventure story. George Sand has been called one of the founders of the ‘problem’ novel but the bulk of her output dealt with those bourgeois emotions: love and passion. I think one of the difficulties here is the refusal to recognize and admit the fact that not all of the concern about the shortcomings of society originated with Marx. Many a socially conscious novelist is merely a man or woman with a conscience. Though part of the cultural heritage of all of us derives from Marx, whether we subscribe to the Marxist theory or not, a larger portion of it stems from the Bible…”
–Ann Petry, “The Novel as Social Criticism,” African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 (Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed.)
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(1953) Nelson Algren, Nonconformity: “We live today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote. The only real difference being that the England of Dickens and the Russia of Dostoevsky could not afford the soundscreens and the smokescreens with which we so ingeniously conceal our true condition from ourselves.
“So accustomed have we become to the testimony of the photo-weeklies, backed by witnesses from radio and TV, establishing us permanently as the happiest, healthiest, sanest, wealthiest, most inventive, tolerant and fun-loving folk yet to grace the earth of man, that we tend to forget that these are bought-and-paid-for witnesses and all their testimony perjured….
“‘Whin business gits above sellin’ ten-pinny nails in a brown-paper cornucopy,’ Mr. Dooley decided, ”tis hard to tell it from murder.’
“But behind Business’s billboards and Business’s headlines and Business’s pulpits and Business’s press and Business’s arsenals, behind the car ads and the subtitles and the commercials, the people of Dickens and Dostoevsky yet endure…. The lost and the overburdened…are still torn by the paradox of their own humanity; yet endure the ancestral problems of the heart in conflict with itself. Theirs are still the defeats in which everything is lost, theirs victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope. Whose defeats cost everything of real value. Whose grief grieves on universal bones.
“And it is there the young man or woman seeking to report the American century seriously must seek, if it is the truth he seeks.” …
(1953) Gilbert Highet, People, Places, Books: “Satire is just as valuable a type of writing as lyric poetry or fiction; but it is far harder to bring off…. In order to write satire of any kind, one has to have a number of special talents, and also a special attitude to the public…. The public usually does not believe that anything is deeply wrong with society, and it often thinks that satirist is a sorehead. It has grown up and found a job and got married and brought up its children in the existing social framework. Why should it believe that the whole thing is tunneled through by gangsters, and bought and sold by crooked politicians, and redesigned to give the biggest profits to the ruthless and the corrupt? No, surely not. Therefore the satirist, who believes these things, usually strains his voice shouting, to making the public hear; and then the public is even less inclined to listen…. They are very amusing and penetrating, these contemporary satires. The only trouble is this: they don’t seem to matter much…. This, I regret to say, is the mid-twentieth century. What we need is a satirist bold enough to attack the crooks who run national politics in many countries; the parasites who make vast fortunes by buying something on Monday and selling it on Tuesday, usually to the government; the idealists who ship five million families off to labor camps in order to make their theories come right; the soreheads whose pride was hurt once and who are determined to start a war to take care of the bruise: the rats in the basement, the baboons playing with dynamite. Satire will not kill these animals; but it will make clear the difference between them and human beings, and perhaps inspire a human being to destroy them.”
“They are very amusing and penetrating, these contemporary satires. The only trouble is this: they don’t seem to matter much. Miss McCarthy spends a lot of care and observation on proving that the Dandelion League colleges are eccentric, confused, and hyper-emotional. Mr. Waugh exposes the burial ceremonies of the Californians with an odd blend of charm and callousness, like sweet-and-sour sauce. But such subjects are not terribly important. This, I regret to say, is the mid-twentieth century.”
(1955) Joseph L. Blotner, The Political Novel: “In The Charterhouse of Parma the witty and urbane Stendhal says, ‘Politics in a work of literature are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention.’ His own work contradicts the great French novelist, yet his comment is perfectly accurate for many other novelists. Politics in some modern novels of political corruption, such as Charles F. Coe’s Ashes, do seem loud and vulgar, and in books like Upton Sinclair’s the reader may hear not one pistol shot but a cannonade. But this is not to say that the use of political material must disrupt a work of literature. The trick, of course, is all in knowing how. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an artistically weak, politically successful work in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while Fyodor Dostoyevsky produced a politically unsuccessful, artistically enduring classic in The Possessed….
“A political novel written from a point of view favoring a particular faction is a political instrument in effect even if not in intent. A writer may sternly tell himself at the outset that he will be completely impartial, only to have reviewers note all sorts of bias, real or imagined, of which he may not have been conscious. This happened to Turgenev when he published Fathers and Sons, and it continues to happen every year. The intensity of the authors’ feelings varies from obsessive preoccupation to passing interest. The novels in this chapter were included because they contain definite opinions, sometimes appeals, on political subjects. Some of them never exhort the reader or seem to lead him by the hand to the author’s point of view. But each of them contains material capable of influencing the reader’s opinions about some phase of political activity. If a novelist gains a reader’s support for a cause, arouses his distaste for a course of action, or simply produces a reevaluation of previously accepted beliefs, his work has served as a political instrument just as surely as a pamphlet mailed by a national committee or a handbill stuffed into the mailboxes of a sleeping city.”
(1955) Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview,” Collected essays, 2003; Shadow and Act, 1964: “I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens and Twain? One hears a lot of complaints about the so-called ‘protest novel,’ especially when written by Negroes, but it seems to me that the critics could more accurately complain about their lack of craftsmanship and the provincialism.”
(1956) Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States—1900-1954: “Taken in its entirety, then, a half-century of the radical novel has had its effect on and made a contribution to American literature. It has also affected and contributed to American life, not just uniquely, however, but as part of the whole larger course of the novel of social protest, that tradition which has proliferated so variously in the troubled twentieth century and which extends back into the nineteenth through the early Hamlin Garland and the Utopians, through Mark Twain, in some of his moods, back to, and well before, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin did as much to change the face of the nation as, perhaps, all the proletarian novels put together. This tradition, which is certainly a great, though not the only one, the radical novel of the present century has helped to continue. Despite their orientation toward Marxism, the Socialist, the proletarian, the independently radical novelists have not been able to obscure the fact that in essential ways they represented yet another manifestation of the American middle-class conscience, which has been the major force behind the literature of social criticism from Harriet Stowe down even to the present day. Viewed as part of a developing process, the radical novel shares in the value of the whole, the value of protest against the still limited democracy that is an affirmation of the democracy that can be. For protest is valuable, quite as valuable as that acceptance without which no continuing social organization is possible. Whether wrong-headed or right, protest will always be essential in order to stir our civilization into self-awareness and thus prevent it from stiffening into an inhuman immobility. In the frequently unwise thirties this rather elementary final statement would have been assumed. That it must now be asserted indicates that the fifties have their own particular lack of wisdom…” [In the 1992 introduction, Rideout notes: “Rereading The Radical Novel in the United States for the first time in decades…it struck me as a reasonably good book…though I did wonder how I could have had the patience to get through so many awful novels in order to reach the fewer worthwhile ones…. In a few reviews, two linked objections emerged…: first, that I had too rigidly limited my subject by defining a radical novel as ‘one which demonstrates, either explicitly or implicitly, that the author objects to the human suffering imposed by some socioeconomic system and advocates that the system be fundamentally changed.’ Granted this definition required me to discuss many bad novels and not to discuss certain better ones; but even bad novels can be illustrative, and it seemed, and still seems, to me that such a sociopolitical definition enabled me to treat in some depth a specifically sociopolitical genre of fiction aimed at fundamental change rather than at reform which would improve the system but not change it basically. Better a limiting definition, I would argue, than one which might turn out to be imprecise and overinclusive.” “My point may be clearer if I move to a second objection, a corollary of the first, that I should have written about the much more extensive fiction of ‘social protest.’ Suppose I had written or tried to write the kind of book these reviewers had wanted me to instead of the one I did. Quite aside from the probability that the ratio of bad to good social protest novels would be about the same as bad to good radical ones, I would have been faced with two problems: how should ‘the fiction of social protest’ be defined, and how could I, or anyone, hope to cover thoroughly in a single volume a very large and disunified field? For really, in American fiction just of the first half of the twentieth century there were many different kinds of social protest going on….”
(1957) Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel: “This book is meant primarily as a study of the relations between literature and ideas, though a considerable part of it, I should say, consists of literary criticism. My interest was far less in literature as social evidence or testimony than in the literary problem of what happens to the novel when it is subjected to the pressures of politics and political ideology. In discussing nineteenth century writers I have employed more or less conventional methods of criticism, while in treating twentieth century writers I have found myself placing a greater stress upon politics and ideology as such; but this was not the result of any preconceived decision, it was a gradual shift in approach that seemed to be required by the nature of the novels themselves” (11).
“The greatest of all political novels, The Possessed, was written with the explicit purpose of excommunicating all beliefs that find salvation anywhere but in the Christian God. ‘I mean to utter certain thoughts,’ wrote Dostoevsky, ‘whether all the artistic side of it goes to the dogs or not…even if it turns into a mere pamphlet, I shall say all that I have in my heart.’ Fortunately Dostoevsky could not suppress his ‘artistic side’ and by the time his book reaches its end it has journeyed through places of the head and heart undreamed of in his original plan. But whatever else it does, The Possessed proves nothing of the kind that might be accessible to proof in ‘a mere pamphlet.’ For while a political novel can enrich our sense of human experience, while it can complicate and humanize our commitments, it is only very rarely that it will alter those commitments themselves. And when it does so, the political novel is engaged in a task of persuasion which is not really its central or distinctive purpose. I find it hard to imagine, say, a serious socialist being dissuaded from his belief by a reading of The Possessed, though I should like equally to think that the quality and nuance of that belief can never be quite as they were before he read The Possessed.
“Because it exposes the impersonal claims of ideology to the pressures of private emotion, the political novel must always be in a state of internal warfare, always on the verge of becoming something other than itself. The political novelist—the degree to which he is aware of this is another problem—establishes a complex system of intellectual movements, in which his own opinion is one of the most active yet not entirely dominating movers. Are we not close here to one of the ‘secrets’ of the novel in general?—I mean the vast respect which the great novelist is ready to offer to the whole idea of opposition, the opposition he needs to allow for in his book against his own predispositions and yearnings and fantasies. He knows that his own momentum, his own intentions, can be set loose easily enough; but he senses, as well, that what matters most of all is to allow for those rocks against which his intentions may smash but, if he is lucky, they may merely bruise. Even as the great writer proudly affirms the autonomy of his imagination, even as he makes the most severe claims for his power of imposing his will upon the unformed materials his imagination has brought up to him, he yet acknowledges that he must pit himself against the imperious presence of the necessary. And in the political novel it is politics above all, politics as both temptation and impediment, that represents the necessary.”
“[…] The criteria for evaluation of a political novel must finally be the same as those for any other novel: how much of our life does it illuminate? how ample a moral vision does it suggest?—but these questions occur to us in a special context, in that atmosphere of political struggle which dominates modern life. For both the writer and the reader, the political novel provides a particularly severe test: politics rakes our passions as nothing else, and whatever we may consent to overlook in reading a novel, we react with an almost demonic rapidity to a detested political opinion. For the writer the great test is, how much truth can he force through the sieve of his opinions? For the reader the great test is, how much of that truth can he accept though it jostle his opinions?” (22-24).
(1957) Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content: “Some critics consider any mention of content a display of bad taste. Some, more innocent and more modern, have been taught – schooled – to look at paintings in such a way as to make them wholly unaware of content…. But again, we must look upon form as the shape of content…
“…form is the right and only possible shape of a certain content. Some other kind of form would have conveyed a different meaning and a different attitude. So when we sit in judgment upon a certain kind of form – and it is usually called lack of form – what we do is to sit in judgment upon a certain type of content.”
“While I concede that almost every situation has its potential artist, that someone will find matter for imagery almost everywhere, I am generally mistrustful of contrived situations, that is situations peculiarly set up to favor the blossoming of art. I feel that they may vitiate the sense of independence which is present to some degree in all art…. One wonders how Cézanne would have progressed if he had been cordially embraced by the Academy. I am plagued by an exasperating notion: What if Goya, for instance, had been granted a Guggenheim, and then, completing that, had stepped into a respectable and cozy teaching job in some small – but advanced! – New England college, and had thus been spared the agonies of the Spanish Insurrection? The unavoidable conclusion is that we would never have had ‘Los Caprichos’ or ‘Los Desastres de la Guerra’….
“Thus, it is not unimaginable that art arises from something stronger than stimulation or even inspiration – that it may take fire from something closer to provocation, that it may not just turn to life, but that it may a certain times be compelled by life. Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority, and its own enlightenment.”
“I believe that if the university’s fostering of art is only kindly, is only altruistic, it may prove to be also meaningless. If, on the other hand, the creative arts, the branches of art scholarship, the various departments or art are to be recognized as an essential part of education, a part without which the individual will be deemed less than educated, then I suppose that art and the arts will feel that degree of independence essential to them; that they will accept it as their role to create freely – to comment, to outrage, perhaps, to be fully visionary and exploratory as is their nature.
“Art should be well-subsidized, yes. But the purchase of a completed painting or a sculpture, the commissioning of a mural – or perhaps the publication of a poem or a novel or the production of a play – all these forms of recognition are the rewards of mature work. They are not to be confused with the setting up of something not unlike a nursery school in which the artist may be spared any conflict, any need to strive quite intently toward command of his medium and his images; in which he may be spared even the need to make desperate choices among his own values and his wants, the need to reject many seeming benefits or wishes. For it is through such conflicts that his values becomes sharpened; perhaps it is only through conflicts that he comes to know himself at all.
“It is only within the context of real life that an artist (or anyone) is forced to make such choices. And it is only against a background of hard reality that choices count, that they affect a life, and carry with them that degree of believe and dedication and, I think I can say, spiritual energy, that is a primary force in art. I do not know whether that degree of intensity can exist within the university; it is one of the problems which an artist must consider if he is to live there or work there.”
(1957) Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History: “In Czarist Russia of the mid-19th–century, a didactic theory of literature was strongly invited not only by political and social conditions but by the actual pre-eminence of a generation of socially conscious novelists…. The greatest Russian literary figure to participate in the 19th-century complex of socio-realistic theory and the writer whose pronouncements on art have impinged with most authority on the English literary mind, was undoubtedly Tolstoy—‘the conscience of Russia’ in his time, ‘the conscience of the world’ ‘the conscience of humanity’…. He was in his middle age a violent convert to a kind of Christian thinking. A period of furious tractarian activity followed the production of the great novels. And it is a religious theory of literature that near the end of his life issues in his thunderously deliberate denunciation of all that he himself and all that European artists for 300 years had created…. The destruction of the idea ‘art for art’s sake’ and the reconstruction of art as a monitor and propagandist for the social process is the gist of Tolstoy’s preachment, and this has been also the monotonous burden of subsequent Marxist criticism in Russia and the instructed echoes of this in English and American writing which sounded in the later 1920’s and the 1930’s… In America the idea of a socially activist literature appears during the first decades of the 20th century with the ‘muckraking’ movement (of which Upton Sinclair’s Mammonart, 1924, may stand as the sufficient symbol) and after that in the overtly Marxist criticism of the later twenties and the thirties—the work of such writers as Michael Gold, editor of the New Masses, Joseph Freeman, editor of the anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States, 1935, and V.F. Calverton, editor of the Modern Quarterly….” [Ignored here, among others, W.E.B. DuBois, editor of Crisis] “A major monument was Vernon Louis Parrington’s three-volume Main Currents in American thought (1927-1930)…. Marxism and the forms of social criticism more closely related to it [V.L. Parrington, et. al.] have never had any real concern with literature and literary problems. In this country the cause enlisted some keen journalistic and literary minds. But a number of them, like Max Eastman as editor of The Masses, avoided sociology in their literary criticism. Eastman shied away from doctrinal and scientific claims for literature and worked up a theory of vivid sensory realization that belongs rather in the tradition of art for art’s sake. Edmund Wilson in Axel’s Castle, 1931, made gestures acknowledging the social responsibility of the artist but only as if in atonement for his having dwelt at such length among the mysteries of symbolism. As early as the anthology acclaiming Proletarian Literature in 1935, the editors of the Partisan Review were observing a flow of ‘gush’ and ‘invective,’ in place of analysis, and the exercise of Marxism as a ‘sentiment’ rather than a ‘science.’ James T. Farrell’s A Note on Literary Criticism, 1936, is a critique by an ‘amateur Marxist’ of the party-line simplifications. By 1939 it was possible for the Partisan editor Philip Rahv to write an essay under the title ‘Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy.’ Marxist naturalism persists in American letters today less as a proclaimed cause than as a deeply rooted sympathy (A Gnostic utopianism) ready with each shift in political or literary dialectics to exert itself in a new stratagem” (460-471).
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(1958) “There is the intricate, yet ultimately persuasive, distinction which Marxist theory draws between ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism.’ It goes back to Hegel’s reflections on the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hegel found that in the Homeric epics the depiction of physical objects, however detailed and stylized, did not intrude upon the rhythm and vitality of the poem. Descriptive writing in modern literature, on the other hand, struck him as contingent and lifeless…. Compared to Homeric or even to medieval times, modern man inhabits the physical world like a rapacious stranger. These ideas greatly influenced Marx and Engels. It contributed to their own theory of the ‘alienation’ of the individual under capitalist modes of production. In the course of their debate with Lassalle and of their study of Balzac, Marx and Engels came to believe that this problem of estrangement was directly germane to the problem of realism in art. The poets of antiquity and the ‘classical realists’ (Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac) had achieved an organic relationship between objective reality and the life of the imagination. The ‘naturalist,’ on the other hand, looks on the world as on a warehouse of whose contents he must make a feverish inventory. ‘A sense of reality,’ says a contemporary Marxist critic, ‘is created not by a reproduction of all the features of an object but by a depiction of those features that form the essence…while in naturalistic art—because of a striving to achieve an elusive fullness—the image, also incomplete, places both the essential and the secondary, the unimportant, on the same plane.’ This distinction is far reaching. It bears on the decline of French realism after Balzac and Stendhal, and tells us something of Zola’s obsessive attempt to make of the novel an index of the world. By virtue of it, we may discriminate between the ‘realism’ of Chekhov and the ‘naturalism’ of, say, Maupassant. Through it, also, we may ascertain that Madame Bovary, for all its virtues, is a slighter thing than Anna Karenina. In naturalism there is accumulation; in realism what Henry James called the ‘deep-breathing economy’ of organic form…” (321-322).
“At the origins of the Marxist theory of literature there are three celebrated and canonic texts. Two of them are citations from Engels’ letters [to Kautsky and Harkness]; the third is contained in a short essay by Lenin [“Party Organization and Party Literature”]…. Engels is not objecting to a litérature engagée as such but rather to the mixture ‘of mere empiricism and empty subjectivity’ in the bourgeois novel of the period. Obviously dissatisfied with this treatment of the problem, Lukács reverted to it in 1945, in his ‘Introduction to the Writings on Aesthetics of Marx and Engels.’ Here he contends that Engels was distinguishing between two forms of litérature à thèse (it is significant that the English language and its critical vocabulary have developed no precisely equivalent expression). All great literature, in Lukács’ reading, has a ‘fundamental bias.’ A writer can only achieve a mature and responsible portrayal of life if he is committed to progress and opposed to reaction, if he ‘loves the good and rejects the bad.’ When a critic of Lukacs’ subtlety and rigor descends to such banalities—banalities which directly challenge his own works on Goethe, Balzac, and Tolstoy—we know that something is amiss. The attempt to reconcile the image of literature implicit in Lenin’s essay with that put forward by Engels is a rather desperate response to the pressures of orthodoxy and to the Stalinist demand for total internal coherence in Marxist doctrine. Even the most delicate exegesis cannot conceal the plain fact that Engels and Lenin were saying different things, that they were pointing toward contrasting ideals” (305-307).
“Marxist-Leninism and the political régimes enacted in its name take literature seriously, indeed desperately so. At the very height of the Soviet revolution’s battle for physical survival, Trotsky found occasion to assert that ‘the development of art is the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch.’ Stalin himself deemed it essential to add to his voluminous strategic and economic pronouncements a treatise on philology and the problems of language in literature. In a Communist society the poet is regarded as a figure central to the health of the body politic. Such regard is cruelly manifest in the very urgency with which the heretical artist is silenced or hounded to destruction. To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs—but a tribute nevertheless” (323).
–George Steiner, “Marxism and the Literary Critic,” in Language and Silence, 1967
(1962) “I’ve been trying to measure the gap between the public and the poet, and to find some explanation why it is so great. I began with the time when there was neither poet nor public, when the anonymous song or ballad was transmitted from generation to generation by the peasantry, and poetry was a possession so common that poet and audience were lost in it; we have been irreversibly changed. At best we can gain from that or oral poetry that beauty which is in it, and the knowledge that poetry is not a thing reserved for a few, since it was once, and for a long time, treasured and fostered by so many. If, knowing this, we could be brought to modify our contemporary notion of poetry as a rarified and special and often difficult thing, it might have a salutary effect on our criticism and our practice of poetry as well…” (94) “There is a greater poetry than that of the ballads; they [ballads] do not contain those universal statements of life which we find in Dante and Shakespeare; but they were once a general possession as Shakespeare has never been. And that great poetry can, or once could, be a general possession is a fact which we should not forget: those of us who write poetry, and those of us who criticize it. If we could keep it in mind, I think it would give us a more just and adequate idea of poetry…” (22) “[A reporter] also quoted Mr. [T. S.] Eliot as saying that ‘criticism of poetry began and ended in enjoyment,’ which I think is the traditional practice. But the observation that is most illuminating in this report is that ‘a genuine poem may arouse a very great number of differing responses, yet there will be always something in common between them,’ and that this is what poetry is for. There have been some very strange responses to poems, as Mr. Richards has shown so convincingly in his book, Practical Criticism, responses which seemed plainly to contradict one another. Yet, even allowing for this, there will be something in common between people’s varied responses to a poem, and the poem exists for that purpose. If we believe this, poetry takes on a wider significance than it is currently allowed, and lets in the ordinary unanalytical reader, and with him human nature. People will read poetry for enjoyment, since that is what it is intended for; and they will not, except in a few exceptional cases, take it up as a strict methodical study. And it may be said that they will get more help, both in enjoyment and understanding, from the traditional critic who tells them what the poem means to him, than from the new one who warns them that it cannot possibly mean what it appears to mean, so that he has no choice left but to explain it. The divorce between the public audience and the poet is widened by this critical method; or perhaps one should rather say that the method legalizes the divorce as a settled and normal state. And that is what we feel to be wrong… (76-77)
“The first allegiance of any poet is to imaginative truth…but it does not mean that he should turn inward into the complex problems of poetry, or be concerned with poetry as a problem. That is something which has commonly happened in the last fifty years. There was some excuse for it after the years of experiment associated with Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound. To them, about 1910, poetry seemed to have come to a dead end, and intense thought had to be given to it. The experiments of that time and the succeeding years have become a part of literary history. As they were new and strange when they were first attempted, they were found difficult by the reader; and they seem to have left for a time in the minds of poets and critics the belief that poetry should be difficult. The experimenters have done their work, and we should be thankful to them. There have been many experimenters in English poetry: Chaucer was one; and Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Wordsworth were all experimenters. The experimenters of forty years ago did something to poetry and something for poetry. One kind of poetry was written before T.S. Eliot, and another kind after him. But the point of an experiment is that it should solve the particular problem set for it. This was done in the twenties…. There remains the temptation for poets to turn inward into poetry, to lock themselves in to a hygienic prison where they speak only to one another, and to the critic, their stern warder. In the end a poet must create his audience, and to do that he must turn outward. Even if he is conscious of having no audience, he must imagine one. That may be the way to conjure it out of the public void. Yeats, who had to wait for it long, declared that you must have an audience, and that he could not write without one. Anyone reading his poetry must feel that the audience was an imaginary one long before it became real. To imagine an audience, one must hold up before himself the variety of human life, for from that diversity the audience will be drawn. The poet need not think of the public—its vastness and impersonality would daunt anyone; he should reflect instead that in no other age than ours—I mean the last hundred years or so—has a poet had to deal with it. He has to see past it, or through it, to the men and women, with their individual lives, who in some strange way and without their choice are part of it, and yet are hidden by it (108-110).
–Edwin Muir, The Estate of Poetry
(1963) “That Karl Marx could not have envisioned the extremes to which the Soviet totalitarians would put his literary theories is obvious. We know, for instance, that his colleague Frederick Engels wrote the following in a letter to an early ‘proletarian’ novelist who asked for Engel’s help in popularizing his novel: ‘Look at your heroine, with her dialectical materialist eyes and her economic determinist nose and her surplus value mouth. You take her in your arms and you kiss her. I know I wouldn’t want to’ ” (145).
–Vernon Hall, Jr., A Short History of Literary Criticism
(1963) “When President Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe with the words, ‘So you’re the little woman who made the book that made this great war,’ he was speaking as a political realist who had learned by experience to respect the power of the pen. It was not for him to refer slightingly to ‘mere literature.’ Without Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the opinion of Sumner, there would have been no Lincoln in the White House.
“But the historian must avoid hyperbole. In spite of the enormous vogue of Mrs. Stowe’s novel, it is doubtful if a book had much power to change the course of events. More persuasive than her tender pleadings was the harsh propaganda carried on by Abolitionists for over thirty years. And mightiest of all was the trend of liberal opinion through the nineteenth century, which was bound to sweep out of existence even the most beneficent and patriarchal of feudal survivals. In the last analysis slavery was abolished because men could no longer endure the thought of it. Shrewd common people were the first to sense how the tide was turning” (563).
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(1964) “American writers have repeatedly been worried, confused, or angered—rarely amused—by the irreconcilability of American ideals and American experience, and one result of this sense of the gulf between the way things should be and the way things are, has been a readiness to regard the novel as a political instrument. English reform movements have tended to be dominated by intellectuals, whose preferred media have been the essay and, occasionally, the problem play. In seeking to achieve radical alterations in society, they have not directly sought mass support; in fact, much of their attention has been directed to the problem of restraining popular unrest and of guiding it into the most profitable channels. …the novels of Ignatius Donnelly, Edward Bellamy, William Dean Howells and many others were the often unsubtle but nonetheless powerful advocates of a wide variety of political doctrines and Utopian dreams. At the end of the nineteenth century, writers such as Gustavus Myers, Jacob Riis, and Lincoln Steffens showed that straight reporting might in certain circumstances be more effective than fiction, but Jack London and Upton Sinclair, more doctrinaire in their approach to social problems, continued to preach socialism through the medium of the novel—presumable because it was wider in its circulation, simpler in its appeal, and less hampered by the discipline of observable fact.
“In addition to these narrowly political writers there have been the many novelists of social protest. Early in the century there were the ‘muckrakers,’ such as Winston Churchill, William Allen White, Robert Herrick, and Ernest Poole; later came Anderson, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, the ‘proletarians,’ and Norman Mailer. For all the differences between them, such novelists of social protest have at least one thing in common: They approach society not in a responsive or sensitive way but with their minds already made up; they come armed not only with their talents but with a theory. It is of the essence of the novelist’s job that he should impose a pattern upon his material, but these novelists impose a pattern not of art but, in the broadest sense, of politics. “[…] It can be argued that the delineation of society as such is a dubious undertaking for any artist. Again and again the material takes charge, as it does in Dreiser; or the political intention takes charge, as in so many of the novelists of social protest; or there is a tendency for the social material, the ‘information,’ to become separated out from the ostensible action of the novel…. The proper function of social description in a novel must be to define and illuminate the human predicament. This is something which English novelists seem almost automatically to have accepted. Many American novelists have not accepted it, and they have often squandered their powers as a result” (196-200).
“In the last analysis, what we ask of the social novelist is not so much that he should reflect our view of society, but that he should make us see society his way” (205) and that such novelists “look beyond [the national experience] to the universal human experience of which it is inevitably a part” (212). “In admiring the novels of George Eliot, we need to remember that what seems to us the accuracy of her social observation is in some degree an indication of her greatness as a novelist, of her power to make us accept the image of society she presents. It matters little whether or not William Faulkner’s novels give an ‘accurate’ picture of the South; what matters supremely is that Faulkner presents his South, the world of Yoknapatawpha County, solidly and vividly, both as a setting and as a conditioning environment…” (205).
–Michael Millgate, American Social Fiction
(1965) “It can be said at once, I should think, that we are all agreed upon the most important point: that morality as shown through human relationships is the whole heart of fiction, and the serious writer has never lived who dealt with anything else. And yet, the zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction much good. The exception occurs when it can rise to the intensity of satire, where it finds a better home in the poem or the drama.”
–Eudora Welty, “Must the Novelist Crusade” (1965), in The Eye of the Story (1978)
(1978) “A study of the writer as a critic of society that ends with science-fiction fantasies and anti-war novels such as A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch-22 had better acquire what academic respectability it can by starting with the ancient Greeks, with Plato in fact. In Plato’s Republic, that early blueprint for a benevolent dictatorship and first example of Utopian fantasy, no place can be found for the imaginative writer. In justification Plato gives three reasons. The poet, he argues, deals with reality at two removes. He tells lies about the gods and heroes, a complaint that is not difficult to translate into terms that would be applicable to any modern dictatorship. And he appeals to emotions, when he should appeal to man’s noblest faculty, the reason. ‘We shall,’ says Plato ‘bow down before a being with such miraculous powers of giving pleasure; but we shall tell him that we are not allowed to have any such person in our commonwealth; we shall crown him with fillets of wool, anoint his head with myrrh, and conduct him to another country’ (Republic, Book 10). Regretfully, because Plato is certainly not unaware of the sublime powers possessed by the inspired poet, but firmly and magisterially, this stern moral puritan dismisses the poet from his ideal state. Here, then, in Plato’s Republic, we have the first memorable statement of the clash between two ideals of order: the inspired order of the artist and the imposed order of the state, an opposition that permeates Romantic and post-Romantic literature. And in exiling the artist from his ideal state, Plato is the first to create for him that very modern role, the Outsider….
“The successful critic of society, it may be suggested, is the writer who learns the wisdom of indirection. He is the writer who learns to combine instruction with delight, without in any way compromising his integrity of blunting the force of his social criticism. Some literary forms are especially suited to methods of indirect attack: satire, for example. From the time of the Greeks onwards, satirists have invented a variety of ways to maintain apparent detachment and the indirect approach, while pressing home their attack. The three commonest forms are the beast fable, the imaginary journey, and the Utopian fantasy. The beast fable has been used by the Greek dramatist Aristophanes in the Frogs, by Chaucer in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and by George Orwell in Animal Farm. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels provides a model for the imaginary journey, while the history of literary utopias stretches—to take it no further—from More’s sixteenth-century Utopia, to Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Morris’s News From Nowhere (1891), and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). It is essential for the satirist’s purpose to shock us into seeing our own familiar world through unfamiliar eyes; some radical change of perspective is therefore absolutely necessary. Each of the three devices, the beast fable, the imaginary journey, and Utopian fantasy achieves this end” (1-2).
–John Colmer, “The Writer as Critic of Society,” Coleridge to Catch-22: Images of Society
(1983) “If we refer to the nineteenth century as the Age of Ideology, then it seems even more appropriate to regard the present century as the Age of Propaganda…. The relationship of literature and art to propaganda is not at all straightforward, and would in any case be dismissed as insignificant by many modern critics, whose evaluative criteria would lead them to make a distinction between ‘real literature’ and ‘tendentious’ writing. Even so, George Orwell, who stated that ‘all art is to some extent propaganda’…, was probably closer to the truth than Hitler, who on one occasion was heard echoing the popular view that ‘art has nothing to do with propaganda’…. Not the least of ironies contained in these seemingly contradictory statements is the fact that Hitler’s remarks were addressed to Josef Goebbels who, as head of the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, had attempted to create a state apparatus for thought control which could have served as a model for the perfect totalitarian state depicted in Orwell’s novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four…. Propaganda does not often come marching towards us waving swastikas and chanting ‘Seig Heil’; its power lies in its capacity to conceal itself, to appear natural, to coalesce completely and indivisibly with the values and accepted power symbols of a given society. When Hitler claimed that art had nothing to do with propaganda he was anticipating a perfectly integrated Nationalist Socialist Germany whose art would spontaneously and unthinkingly reproduce the desired images and perceptions. Even in the early revolutionary period of the Third Reich, Goebbels, who had objected to the word propaganda being used in the title of his Ministry, insisted that ‘news is best given out in such a way that it appears to be without comment but is itself tendentious’…. If a simple principle can be derived from the discussion so far, it is that the recognition of propaganda can be seen as a function of the ideological distance which separates the observer from the act of communication observed…. Hitler’s assertion that art has nothing to do with propaganda does not contradict Orwell’s statement that all art is propaganda, but is rather contained within it, for the propaganda-free art which Hitler envisaged was an art within which the values and beliefs of National Socialism would be dominant, invisible and totally natural. This ‘illusion of pure aestheticism’ was for Orwell a reminder that ‘propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose—a political, social and religious purpose—that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs’…. Although there is no ready-made method for detecting propaganda, we can become aware of the general categories in which it manifests itself and we can attempt to classify its techniques and forms…. This approach does not mean that we must study literature as a set of documents rather than as a set of aesthetic objects. For in effect it denies the validity of such a distinction by assuming that the propagandistic or demystifying moment of literary communication may be inseparable from its aesthetic function….”
–A. P. Foulkes, Literature and Propaganda (from the Introduction and Conclusion)
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(1983) “In ordinary critical usage, the term ‘roman à thèse’ has a strongly negative connotation; it designates works that are too close to propaganda to be artistically valid. No self-respecting writer would consent to call his novels by that name. A roman à thèse is always the work of an ‘other’… There do exist a few critical studies, published quite a while ago, that discuss [certain] novels…as ‘political novels’ or as examples of ‘committed’ or engagé literature. Neither of these categories corresponds exactly, however, to the roman à thèse. The political novel as a generic category is at once too broad (Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme is, as Irving Howe has shown, a superb political novel, but it is not a roman à thèse) and too narrow (Mauriac’s ‘Catholic novel,’ Le Noeud de vipers, is a roman à thèse, but not a political novel). As for ‘littérature engagée,’ it is too imprecise a term to designate a genre; furthermore, I feel it is too specifically associated with the name of Sartre, who did not invent the term but who made it current—and who, incidentally, went out of his way to distinguish ‘engagé’ novels from roman à these (although it may once again have been a matter of rejecting the name rather than the thing itself)…. As a starting point, I propose the following definition: a roman à thèse is a novel written in the realistic mode (that is, based on an aesthetic of verisimilitude and representation), which signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent, seeking to demonstrate the validity of a political, philosophical, or religious doctrine…. One could…claim that every novel, indeed every work of fiction…, can be read as expounding a ‘thesis,’ to the extent that it is always possible to extract from it a general maxim of some kind…. Following this line of reasoning, one would soon have to conclude that the roman à thèse is everywhere and nowhere—in other words, that it is a phenomenon of reading (viewed from a certain angle, all works are didactic) rather than of writing. At that point, there would be no reason to try to define a genre called roman à thèse, for the concept of genre implies that there exist certain properties that texts have in common, not that (or not only that) there exist certain modes of reading—or as is commonly said nowadays, certain interpretive strategies—that can be applied to any and every text. [However]…I consider undeniable…: there exist nontrivial differences between and among texts, as well as between readers, or between interpretive strategies that readers deploy in order to understand a text. Novels that are roman à thèse have certain identifiable traits which distinguish them from other novels and other genres. One of these traits, and no doubt the most important one is that romans à thèse forumulate, in an insistent, consistent, and unambiguous manner, the thesis (or theses) they seek to illustrate…. Whether its thesis is conservative or radical, defending the status quo or calling for its abolition, the roman à thèse is essentially an authoritarian genre: it appeals to the need for certainty, stability, and unity that is one of the elements of the human psyche; it affirms absolute truths, absolute values” (3-10).
(1983) Introductory quotations from Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Authoritarian Fictions:
“Literature, as it has been understood by all the masters, is an interpretation of life. It eliminates in order to prove.” –Maurice Barrès
“All literature is propaganda. […] Art, for us, is what makes propaganda effective, what is capable of moving men in the direction we wish. –Paul Nizan
“Then comes the modern question: why is there not today (or at least so it seems to me), why is there no longer an art of intellectual persuasion, or imagination? Why are we so slow, so indifferent about mobilizing narrative and the image? Can’t we see that it is, after all, works of fiction, no matter how mediocre they may be artistically, that best arouse political passion? –Roland Barthes
“…it is the very notion of a work created for the expression of a social, political, economic, moral, etc. content that constitutes a lie.”
–Alain Robbe-Grillet
(1987-1999) “[Orwell’s Problem: how is it that oppressive ideological systems are able to] instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with the obvious facts about the world around us?” “If Orwell, instead of writing 1984—which was actually, in my opinion, his worst book, a kind of trivial caricature of the most totalitarian society in the world, which made him famous and everybody loved him, because it was the official enemy—if instead of doing that easy and relatively unimportant thing, he had done the hard and important thing, namely talk about Orwell’s Problem [as pertains to England and western states], he would not have been famous and honored: he would have been hated and reviled and marginalized.” […] “About Orwell's 1984, I thought, frankly, it was one of his worst books. Could barely finish it. Some parts (e.g., about Newspeak) were clever. But most of it seemed to me—well, trivial. The problem is not a very interesting one; the modes of thought control and repression in totalitarian societies are fairly transparent. In fact, they often tend to be rather lax. Franco Spain, for example, didn't care much what people thought and said: the screams from the torture chamber in downtown Madrid were enough to keep the lid on. It's not too well known, but the Soviet Union was also pretty lax, particularly in the Brezhnev era. According to US government-Russian Research Center studies, Russians apparently had considerably wider access to a broad range of opinion and to dissident literature than Americans do, not because it is denied them but because propaganda is so much more effective here. Orwell was well aware of these issues. His (suppressed) introduction to Animal Farm, for example, deals explicitly with "literary censorship in England." To write about that topic would have been important, hard, and serious—and would have earned him the obloquy that attends departure from the rules.
“Caricature can be very well done. Swift is marvelous, for example. Animal Farm is pretty good, in my opinion. But 1984 I thought was a serious decline from his best work. Caricature is an art, and not an easy one. But when well done, a very important one. As for dealing with Orwell's problem, I try to do it in the ways I know how to pursue; 1000s of pages by now. No doubt there are other ways, maybe better ways. But others will have to find what works for them. …my co-author Edward Herman has done excellent work of caricature on Orwell's problem. I am thinking of his work on "doublespeak," including a book, modeled more or less on Ambrose Bierce.”
“If you want to learn about people’s personalities and intentions, you would probably do better reading novels than reading psychology books. Maybe that’s the best way to come to an understanding of human beings and the way they act and feel, but that’s not science. Science isn’t the only thing in the world, it is what it is…science is not the only way to come to an understanding of things.” “If I am interested in learning about people, I’ll read novels rather than psychology.” “I think the Victorian novel tells us more about people than science ever will…and we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” “We learn from literature as we learn from life; no one knows how, but it surely happens. In fact, most of what we know about things that matter comes from such sources, surely not from considered rational inquiry (science), which sometimes reaches unparalleled depths of profundity, but has a rather narrow scope.” “It is almost certain that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called ‘the full human person’ than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do. “[However] I’ve been always resistant consciously to allowing literature to influence my beliefs and attitudes with regard to society and history.” “There are things I resonate to when I read, but I have a feeling that my feelings and attitudes were largely formed prior to reading literature.” “Look, there’s no question that as a child, when I read about China, this influenced my attitudes–-Rickshaw Boy, for example. That had a powerful effect when I read it. It was so long ago I don’t remember a thing about it, except the impact. And I don’t doubt that, for me, personally, like anybody, lots of my perceptions were heightened and attitudes changed by literature over a broad range–Hebrew Literature, Russian literature, and so on. But ultimately, you have to face the world as it is on the basis of other sources of evidence that you can evaluate.” “If I want to understand the nature of China and its revolution, I ought to be cautious about literary renditions.” “Literature can heighten your imagination and insight and understanding, but it surely doesn’t provide the evidence that you need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions.” “I can think of things I read that had a powerful effect on me, but whether they changed my attitudes and understanding in any striking or crucial way, I can’t really say.” “People certainly differ, as they should, in what kinds of things make their minds work.” “I don’t really feel that I can draw any tight connections [personally].”
–Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, biographies, etc…
(1988) “When the MLA put together its centennial issue of PMLA in May 1984, it commissioned Paul Lauter to write about the impact of society on the profession of literary criticism between 1958 and 1983. Lauter was a radical associated with the Movement in the sixties…. According to Lauter, the MLA between the fifties and the eighties had expanded and diversified immensely, yet ‘the hierarchy of the profession remains fundamentally unaltered, so—as yet—does the hierarchy of what we value’…. This conclusion was based on two surveys of hundreds of syllabi collected from around the nation in the eighties. Just as the reigning critical ideology in the late 1950s was ‘formalism,’ so the dominant mode of criticism in the 1980s was ‘formalism,’ however expanded to include hermeneutics, semiotics, and poststructuralism, all of which criticism ‘accepts the formalist stance by analyzing texts, including its own discourse, primarily as autonomous objects isolated from their social origins or functions’…. What most dismayed Lauter about such fashionable criticism were its alignment with linguistics and philosophy rather than history and sociology, its tendency to become obscurant self-referential metacriticism in a debauch of professionalism, its preference for a limited canon of elitist texts, its increasing abnegation of practical exegesis and humanistic values, and its deepening occupation of the core of the profession”…. [Even the rebirth of Marxist criticism in the 1970s deviated from “history and sociology” in that]: “What was odd about the Marxist criticism of this [1970s] Renaissance associated with the post-1950s new left and the Movement was its complete disregard of the old left. Mention was never made of V. F. Calverton, James T. Farrell, Granville Hicks, Bernard Smith, Edmund Wilson, or other Leftist Critics prominent in the thirties. The native tradition of radicalism stemming from the nineteenth century had been forgotten during the heyday of the new left….”
“In H. Bruce Franklin’s view, what was wrong with academic literary professionals was their thorough immersion in the bourgeois ideology of formalism, which itself was rooted in the counterrevolutionary antiproletarianism of the thirties. ‘In the present era, formalism is the use of aestheticism to blind us to social and moral reality’….”
“Rather than an instrument or weapon of ruling-class oppression, literature was potentially liberating [in the view of Louis Kampf], provided it was set within a living context close to daily life and removed from its sacrosanct place in the great tradition. ‘In spite of our academic merchants, literature is not a commodity, but the sign of a creative act which expresses personal, social, and historical needs. As such it constantly undermines the status quo.’ The task of the radical critic was to destroy received dogmas and procedures, letting literature be an instrument of agitation and resistance and a force for freedom and genuine liberation. ‘As members of the educated middle class, we must learn that our words should discredit our own culture. Those of us who are literary intellectuals and teachers ought to illustrate in our work that the arts are not alone available to those who are genteel…’.”
–Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s (Chapter Thirteen: “Leftist Criticism from the 1960s to the 1980s”)
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–Toni Cade Bambara, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.)
(1990) “I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, ‘Why don’t they?’ And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably to social change. So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”
–Audre Lorde, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.)
(1993) “The 1930s literary radicals, I have demonstrated, brought various considerations to bear in their definitions of proletarian literature. There was, however, no party line on the subject. As Jack Conroy remarked retrospectively about the debates over what proletarian literature was, ‘We used to talk about it endlessly and never arrived at any definite conclusion’…. Even if writers did not feel bound to one or another definition of proletarian literature, [certain] critics argue, they felt obliged to conform to a rigid didacticism involving stock characters, formulaic plots, and a programmatic optimism. Art had to be a weapon and, as such, an instrument of propaganda. But since art and propaganda are antagonistically opposed, left-wing didactic literature was condemned to mouthing slogans and preaching conversion to the cause.
“In future chapters we will have the opportunity to determine whether proletarian novels were in fact as formulaic and predictable as their detractors charge. What I shall argue in this chapter is that there is very limited validity to the charge that routinely accompanies accusations of political straitjacketing—namely, that Third-Period Marxist critics, as mouthpieces for the party line, sought to impose a specifically propagandistic view of literature upon the writers in the party orbit. I shall show that left-wing literary commentators only rarely promoted the notion that literary works should impart or promote specific tenets of party doctrine; insofar as the critics had a coherent aesthetic theory, this theory was almost exclusively cognitive and reflectionist rather than agitational and hortatory. Indeed, I shall argue that in certain important ways the American approach to questions of representation and ideology was committed—as was the dominant tendency in all Marxist criticism of this period, Soviet and European—to a number of premises about literary form that were bourgeois rather than revolutionary. Literary radicals might applaud proletarian novelists whose works encouraged revolutionary class partisanship. Gold hailed Conroy as ‘a proletarian shock-trooper whose weapon is literature’; the novelist Ruth McKenney wrote Isidor Schneider that his From the Kingdom of Necessity was ‘a more powerful weapon than any tear gas the other side can manufacture.’ In general, however, commentators, critics and novelists alike, held back from theorizing—let alone legislating—any of the representational maneuvers specific to this literary weaponry. Their espoused commitment to the notion that all literature is propaganda for one side or another in the class struggle was countered by a deep antipathy to viewing proletarian literature as propagandistic in any of its distinctive rhetorical strategies. The 1930s radicals never fully repudiated the bourgeois counterposition of art to propaganda: to them, proletarian literature contained very different values and assumptions, but as literature, it was just like any other kind of writing. Ironically, to the extent that they were prescriptive in advocating any given set of aesthetic principles, the Marxist critics urged a largely depoliticized conception of mimetic practice that coexisted only uneasily with many of the values and ideas that they congratulated writers for articulating in their texts” (129-131).
–Barbara Foley, “Art or Propaganda,” in Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941
(1995) “Ernest Hemingway, thinking of himself, as always, once said that all American literature grew out of Huck Finn. It undoubtedly would have been better for American literature, and American culture, if our literature had grown out of one of the best-selling novels of all time, another American work of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which for its portrayal of an array of thoughtful, autonomous, and passionate black characters leaves Huck Finn far behind… The power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the power of brilliant analysis married to great wisdom of feeling. Stowe never forgets the logical end of any relationship in which one person is the subject and the other is the object. No matter how the two people feel, or what their intentions are, the logic of the relationship is inherently tragic and traps both parties until the false subject/object relationship is ended. Stowe’s most oft-repeated and potent representation of this inexorable logic is the forcible separation of family members, especially of mothers from children…. The grief and despair [the] women display is no doubt what T.S. Eliot was thinking of when he superciliously labeled Uncle Tom’s Cabin ‘sensationalist propaganda,’ but, in fact, few critics in the nineteenth century ever accused Stowe of making up or even exaggerating such stories. One group of former slaves who were asked to comment on Stowe’s depiction of slave life said that she had failed to portray the very worst, and Stowe herself was afraid that if she told some of what she had heard from escaped slaves and other informants during her eighteen years in Cincinnati, the book would be too dark to find any readership at all… One of Stowe’s most skillful techniques is her method of weaving a discussion of slavery into the dialogue of her characters…. Stowe also understands that the real root of slavery is that it is profitable as well as customary…. The very heart of nineteenth-century American experience and literature, the nature and meaning of slavery, is finally what Twain cannot face in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn…. Why, then, we may ask, did Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for all its power and popularity, fail to spawn American literature? Fail, even, to work as a model for how to draw passionate, autonomous and interesting black literary characters? Fail to keep the focus of the American literary imagination on the central dilemma of the American experience: race? …The real loss, though, is not to our literature but to our culture and ourselves, because we have lost the subject of how the various social groups who may not escape to the wilderness are to get along in society; and, in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the hard-nosed, unsentimental dialogue about race that we should have been having since before the Civil War. Obviously, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is no more the last word on race relations than The Brothers Karamazov or David Copperfield is on any number of characteristically Russian or English themes and social questions…. When Stowe’s voice, a courageously public voice—as demonstrated by the public arguments about slavery that rage throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin—fell silent in our culture and was replaced by the secretive voice of Huck Finn, who acknowledges Jim only when they are alone on the raft together out in the middle of the big river, racism fell out of the public world and into the private one where whites think it really is but blacks know it really isn’t.” “Should Huckleberry Finn be taught in the schools? The critics of the Propaganda Era laid the groundwork for the universal inclusion of the book in school curriculums by declaring it great. Although they predated the current generation of politicized English professors, this was clearly a political act…. I would rather my children read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, even though it is far more vivid in its depiction of cruelty than Huck Finn, and this is because Stowe’s novel is clearly and unmistakably a tragedy. No whitewash, no secrets, but evil, suffering, imagination, endurance, and redemption—just like life. Like little Eva, who eagerly but fearfully listens to the stories of the slaves that her family tries to keep from her, our children want to know what is going on, what has gone on, and what we intend to do about it. If ‘great’ literature has any purpose, it is to help us face up to our responsibilities instead of enabling us to avoid them once again by lighting out for the territory.”
–Jane Smiley, “Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s ‘Masterpiece,’ Harpers, December 1995
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“Fiction has a unique capacity to bring difficult issues to a broad readership on a personal level, creating empathy in a reader’s heart for the theoretical stranger. Its capacity for invoking moral and social responsibility is enormous. Throughout history, every movement toward a more peaceful and humane world has begun with those who imagined the possibilities. The Bellwether Prize seeks to support the imagination of humane possibilities.
“Defining a literature of social change: Socially responsible literature, for the purposes of this award, may describe categorical human transgressions in a way that compels readers to examine their own prejudices. It may invoke the necessity for economic and social justice for a particular ethnic or social group, or it may explicitly examine movements that have brought positive social change. Or, it may advocate the preservation of nature by describing and defining accountable relationships between people and their environment. The mere description of an injustice, or of the personal predicament of an exploited person, without any clear position of social analysis invoked by the writer, does not in itself constitute socially responsible literature. ‘Social responsibility’ describes a moral obligation of individuals to engage with their communities in ways that promote a more respectful coexistence.
“Clear, analytical and literary accounts of political and social injustice (either current or historical) include the following excellent examples: Beloved, by Toni Morrison; Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson; To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee; Crows Over a Wheatfield, Paula Sharp; Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison; The Women’s Room, Marilyn French; Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen, Alix Kates Shulman; Mean Spirit, Linda Hogan; Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks; The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver; The Color Purple, Alice Walker. Other contemporary contributors to this tradition include Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, Ursula Hegi, Ursula K. LeGuin, Ruth Ozeki, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, and John Edgar Wideman.
“These authors notwithstanding, issues of social responsibility have in recent decades held a less commanding place in U.S. literature than in the wider world. Social commentary in our art is frequently viewed with suspicion. Its advocacy does not fall within the stated goals of any major North American publisher, endowment, or prize for the arts. The Bellwether Prize was conceived to address this deficiency. We would like to see the place of conscience in our nation’s artistic landscape restored to the same high position it holds elsewhere in the world. By means of this prize we hope to enlist North American writers, publishers, and readers to share in this crucial endeavor.”
–[Barbara Kingsolver] Bellwether Prize
– NOTE: I view the views by Wood in the several excerpts below to be essentially misguided, though he is referring to novels with a variety of weaknesses. I include the excerpts here however because they are a useful reference to lit establishment views about politics and society in fiction. –
(2001)
“Zadie Smith is merely of her time when she says, in an interview, that it is not the writer’s job ‘to tell us how somebody felt about something, it’s to tell us how the world works.’ She has praised the American writers David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers as ‘guys who know a great deal about the world. They understand macro-microeconomics, the way the internet works, maths, philosophy, but… they’re still people who know something about the street, about family, love, sex, whatever.’ But this idea—that the novelist’s task is to go on to the street and figure out social reality—may well have been altered by the events of September 11, merely through the reminder that whatever the novel gets up to, the ‘culture’ can always get up to something bigger. Ashes defeat garlands. If topicality, relevance, reportage, social comment, preachy presentism, and sidewalk-smarts—in short, the contemporary American novel in its current, triumphalist form—are novelists’ chosen sport, then they will sooner or later be outrun by their own streaking material. Fiction may well be, as Stendhal wrote, a mirror carried down the middle of a road; but the Stendhalian mirror would explode with reflections were it now being walked around Manhattan. For who would dare to be knowledgeable about politics and society now? Is it possible to imagine Don DeLillo today writing his novel Mao II—a novel that proposed the foolish notion that the terrorist now does what the novelist used to do, that is, ‘alter the inner life of the culture’? Surely, for a while, novelists will be leery of setting themselves up as analysts of society, while society bucks and charges so helplessly. Surely they will tread carefully over their generalisations. It is now very easy to look very dated very fast.”
–James Wood, “Tell Me How Does It Feel?” The Guardian, October 6, 2001
(2001) “If anyone still had a longing for the great American ‘social novel,’ the events of September 11 may have corrected it…a passage at the conclusion of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, about the end of the American century, now seems laughably archival: ‘It seemed to Enid that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they’d been in her youth. She had memories of the 1930s, she’d seen firsthand what could happen to a country when the world economy took its gloves off…. But disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States. Safety features had been put in place, like the squares of rubber that every modern playground was paved with, to soften impacts.’ Despite the falter of this passage, Franzen would probably agree that the novel should not go chasing after the bait of social information. Five years ago he published an essay in Harper’s in which he declared that the social novel is no longer possible. The piece was so punctually intelligent and affecting—it had the charm and the directness typical of his work—and it was above all so long, that few noticed its incoherence. Franzen began by admitting to a recent depression, a dejection about the American novel, a ‘despair about the possibility of connecting the personal and the social.’ No challenging novel since Catch-22 had truly affected the culture, he complained. As a young writer he had believed that ‘putting a novel’s characters in a dynamic social setting enriched the story that was being told.’ The novel, he used to think, should bring ‘social news, social instruction.’ It should ‘Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream.’ It had ‘a responsibility to dramatize important issues of the day.’ Franzen’s first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, was such a book; but it came and went pretty quietly, and Franzen was left pondering ‘the failure of my culturally engaged novel to engage with the culture. I’d intended to provoke; what I got instead was sixty reviews in a vacuum.’ To be sure, there was a book tour, a photo spread in Vogue, and a large advance (which is more than most serious writers are vouchsafed): all this was merely ‘the consolation of no longer mattering to the culture.’ Franzen’s second novel also dribbled into the celebrity-sand; there were good reviews, ‘decent sales, and the deafening silence of irrelevance.’ So the social novel, it seemed, had no utility. The novel had lost its cultural centrality, its cultural power; modern technologies, such as television, ‘do a better job of social instruction.’ And how to create something permanent whose subject—modern culture—is ephemeral? Franzen rightly asked the question, perhaps the most tormenting one for contemporary novelists, of how to write a novel both of its time and properly resistant to its time: ‘how can you achieve topical “relevance” without drawing on an up-to-the-minute vocabulary of icons and attitudes and thereby, far from challenging the hegemony of overnight obsolescence, confirming and furthering it?’ By the end of his essay, Franzen had decided that there was ‘something wrong with the whole model of the novel of social engagement,’ and had admitted to a ‘conviction that bringing “meaningful news” is no longer so much a defining function of the novel as an accidental product.’ The solution, it seemed, was aesthetic. ‘Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn’t this enough? Isn’t it a lot?’ It certainly is.”
–James Wood, “Abhorring a Vacuum,” The New Republic, October 18, 2001 [retitled in part as an essay on the “Social Novel” in The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, 2004]
(2002) “In his memoir The Noise of Time, Mandelstam recalls a haughty friend who used to say, disdainfully, that ‘some men are books, others—newspapers.’ The remark might be adapted. Some books are books, others—newspapers. In recent years, the large American novel has frequently aspired to the condition of journalism. The great quarry of the last decade, and sometimes the great cemetery, has been the social novel, the vast report on the way we live now, the stuffed dossier, the thriving broadsheet streaming with contemporary brightnesses. Tom Wolfe’s barely literate plea for more of just this kind of fiction has always seemed nonsensical in the age of Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and most recently Jonathan Franzen. We have too much socially and politically obsessed fiction, not too little. Mimesis deserves a holiday. The bright book of life need not include all of life.”
–James Wood, “Unions,” The New Republic, October 10, 2002
(2003) “I suggest that the role of the artist is to transcend conventional wisdom, to transcend the word of the establishment, to transcend the orthodoxy, to go beyond and escape what is handed down by the government or what is said in the media…. It is the job of the artist to think outside the boundaries of permissible thought and dare to say things that no one else will say…. It is absolutely patriotic to point a finger at the government to say that it is not doing what it should be doing to safeguard the right of citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…. We must be able to look at ourselves, to look at our country honestly and clearly. And just as we can examine the awful things that people do elsewhere, we have to be willing to examine the awful things that are done here by our government.”
–Howard Zinn, Artists in Times of War
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(1864) To work for the people, – that is the great and urgent necessity.
The human mind – an important thing to say at this minute – has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real.
It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live. Now, do you wish to realize the difference? Animals exist, man lives.
To live, is to understand. To live, is to smile at the present, to look toward posterity over the wall. To live, is to have in one’s self a balance, and to weigh in it the good and evil. To live, is to have justice, truth, reason, devotion, probity, sincerity, common-sense, right, and duty nailed to the heart. To live, is to know what one is worth, what one can do and should do. Life is conscience. Cato would not rise before Ptolemy. Cato lived.
Literature is the secretion of civilization, poetry of the ideal. That is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why poetry is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first instructors of the people…(257).
We have just said, “Literature is the secretion of civilization.” Do you doubt it? Open the first statistics you come across.
Here is one which we find under our hand: Bagne de Toulon, 1862. Three thousand and ten prisoners. Of these three thousand and ten convicts, forty know a little more than to read and write, two hundred and eighty-seven know how to read and write, nine hundred and four read badly and write badly, seventeen hundred and seventy-nine know neither how to read nor write…(258).
The transformation of the crowd into the people, – profound labour! It is to this labour that the men called socialists have devoted themselves during the last forty years. The author of this book, however insignificant he may be, is one of the oldest in the labour; “Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné” dates from 1828, and “Claude Gueux” from 1834. He claims his place among these philosophers because it is a place of persecution. A certain hatred of socialism, very blind, but very general, has been at work most bitterly among the influential classes. (Classes, then, are still in existence?) Let it not be forgotten, socialism, true socialism, has for its end the elevation of the masses to the civic dignity, and therefore its principal care is for moral and intellectual cultivation. The first hunger is ignorance; socialism wishes then, above all, to instruct. That does not hinder socialism from being calumniated, and socialists from being denounced. To most of the infuriated, trembling cowards who have their say at the present moment, these reformers are public enemies. They are guilty of everything that has gone wrong…(259).
The democratic idea, the new bridge of civilization, undergoes at this moment the formidable trial of overweight. Every other idea would certainly give way under the load that it is made to bear. Democracy proves its solidity by the absurdities that are heaped on, without shaking it. It must resist everything that people choose to place on it. At this moment they try to make it carry despotism…(260).
That history has to be re-made is evident. Up to the present time, it has been nearly always written from the miserable point of view of accomplished fact; it is time to write from the point of view of principle, – and that, under penalty of nullity…(347).
– Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare
(1883) “You may well think I am not here to criticize any special school of art or artists, or to plead for any special style, or to give you any instructions, however general, as to the practice of the arts. Rather I want to take counsel with you as to what hindrances may lie in the way towards making art what it should be, a help and solace to the daily life of all men…. Since I am a member of a Socialist propaganda I earnestly beg those of you who agree with me to help us actively, with your time and your talents if you can, but if not, at least with your money, as you can…. Help us now, you whom the fortune of your birth has helped to make wise and refined; and as you help us in our work-a-day business toward the success of the cause, instill into us your superior wisdom, your superior refinement, and you in your turn may be helped by the courage and hope of those who are not so completely wise and refined. Remember we have but one weapon against that terrible organization of selfishness which we attack, and that weapon is Union” (108-127).
–William Morris, On Art and Socialism
(1885) “It is always bad for an author to be infatuated with his hero, and it seems to me that in this case [Minna Kautsky’s novel Old and New] you have given way somewhat to this weakness… I am not at all an opponent of tendentious poetry as such. The father of tragedy, Aeschylus, and the father of comedy, Aristophanes, were both decidedly tendentious poets, just as were Dante and Cervantes; and the main merit of Schiller’s Craft and Loves is that it is the first German political propaganda drama. The modern Russians and Norwegians, who are writing splendid novels, are all tendentious. But I think that the bias [thesis] should flow by itself from the situation and action, without particular indications [explicit display], and that the writer is not obliged to obtrude on the reader the future historical solutions of the social conflicts pictured. And especially in our conditions the novel appeals mostly to readers of bourgeois circles, that is, not directly related to us, and therefore a socialist-biased novel fully achieves its purpose, in my view, if by conscientiously describing the real mutual relations, breaking down conventional illusions about them, it shatters the optimism of the bourgeois world, although the author does not offer any definite solutions or does not even line up openly on any particular side…. And in Stefan you showed that you are able to view your heroes with that fine irony which demonstrates the power of the writer over his creation.”
–Frederick Engels, Letter to Minna Kautsky (1885), in Literature and Art [Marx and Engels], 1947 (also excerpted and translated somewhat differently by George Steiner in “Marxism and the Literary Critic,” 1958, in Language and Silence, 1967)
(1888) “I am far from finding fault with you for not having written a point-blank socialist novel, a ‘Tendenzroman’ as we Germans call it, to glorify the social and political views of the author. That is not at all what I mean. The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art.”
–Frederick Engels, Letter to Margaret Harkness (excerpted by George Steiner in “Marxism and the Literary Critic,” 1958, in Language and Silence, 1967)
(1898) “This investigation has brought me to the conviction that almost all that our society considers to be art, good art, and the whole of art, far from being real and good art and the whole of art, is not even art at all but only a counterfeit of it…. In our society the difficulty of recognizing real works of art is further increased by the fact that the external quality of the work in false productions is not only no worse, but often better, than in real ones; the counterfeit is often more effective than the real, and its subject more interesting… There is one indubitable sign distinguishing real art from its counterfeit—namely, the infectiousness of art…”
–Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?
(1903) “ ‘The novel must not preach,’ you hear them say. As though it were possible to write a novel without a purpose, even if it is only the purpose to amuse. One is willing to admit that this savors a little of quibbling, for ‘purpose’ and purpose to amuse are two different purposes. But every novel, even the most frivolous, must have some reason for the writing of it, and in that sense must have a ‘purpose’. Every novel must do one of three things—it must tell something, (2) show something, or (3) prove something. Some novels do all three of these; some do only two; all must do at least one…. The third, and what we hold to be the best class, proves something, draws conclusions from a whole congeries of forces, social tendencies, race impulses, devotes itself not to a study of men but of man. In this class falls the novel with the purpose, such as ‘Les Miserables’. And the reason we decide upon this last as the highest form of the novel is because that, though setting a great purpose before it as its task, it nevertheless includes, and is forced to include, both the other classes…. [The novel] may be a great force, that works together with the pulpit and the universities for the good of the people, fearlessly proving that power is abused, that the strong grind the faces of the weak, that an evil tree is still growing in the midst of the garden, that undoing follows hard upon unrighteousness, that the course of Empire is not yet finished, and that the races of men have yet to work out their destiny in those great and terrible movements that crush and grind and rend asunder the pillars of the houses of the nations” (203-207).
–Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist
(1905) “Literature must become Party literature…. Down with un-partisan littérateurs! Down with the supermen of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat, ‘a small cog and a small screw’ in the social-democratic mechanism, one and indivisible—a mechanism set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the whole working class. Literature must become an integral part of the organized, methodical, and unified labours of the social-democratic Party.”
–Vladimir Lenin, “Party Organization and Party Literature,” in Novaia Jizn
(1924) The book purposes to investigate the whole process of art creation, and to place the art function in relation to the sanity, health and progress of mankind. It will attempt to set up new canons in the arts, overturning many of the standards now accepted. A large part of the world’s art treasures will be taken out to the scrap-heap, and a still larger part transferred from the literature shelves to the history shelves of the world’s library.
Since childhood the writer has lived most of his life in the world’s art. For thirty years he has been studying it consciously, and for twenty-five years he has been shaping in his mind the opinions here recorded; testing and revising them by the art-works which he has produced, and by the stream of other men’s work which has flowed through his mind. His decisions are those of a working artist, one who has been willing to experiment and blunder for himself, but who has also made it his business to know and judge the world’s best achievements.
The conclusion to which he has come is that mankind is today under the spell of utterly false conceptions of what art is and should be; of utterly vicious and perverted standards of beauty and dignity. We list six great art lies now prevailing in the world, which this book will discuss:
Lie Number One: the Art for Art’s Sake lie; the notion that the end of art is in the art work, and that the artist’s sole task is perfection of form. It will be demonstrated that this lie is a defensive mechanism of artists run to seed, and that its prevalence means degeneracy, not merely in art, but in the society where such art appears.
Lie Number Two: the lie of Art Snobbery; the notion that art is something esoteric, for the few, outside the grasp of the masses. It will be demonstrated that with few exceptions of a special nature, great art has always been popular art, and great artists have swayed the people.
Lie Number Three: the lie of Art Tradition; the notion that new artists must follow old models, and learn from the classics how to work. It will be demonstrated that vital artists make their own technique; and that present-day technique is far and away superior to the technique of any art period preceding.
Lie Number Four: the lie of Art Dilettantism; the notion that the purpose of art is entertainment and diversion, an escape from reality. It will be demonstrated that this lie is a product of mental inferiority, and that the true purpose of art is to alter reality.
Lie Number Five: the lie of the Art Pervert; the notion that art has nothing to do with moral questions. It will be demonstrated that all art deals with moral questions; since there are no other questions.
Lie Number Six: the lie of Vested Interest; the notion that art excludes propaganda and has nothing to do with freedom and justice. Meeting that issue without equivocation, we assert:
All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.
As commentary on the above, we add, that when artists or art critics make the assertion that art excludes propaganda, what they are saying is that their kind of propaganda is art, and other kinds of propaganda are not art.
–Upton Sinclair, Mammonart: An Essay on Economic Interpretation
(1926) “…all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”
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1990 Bardes and Gossett Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
1990 Malcolm Cowley The Portable Malcolm Cowley
1990 Eagleton, Jameson, Said Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature
1990 Lee Horsley Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination
1990 Pearlman and Henderson A Voice of One’s Own: Conversations with America’s Writing Women
1990 Ishmael Reed Writin’ is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper
1990 Claudia Tate Black Women Writers at Work [Angelou, Bambara, Brooks, Deveaux, Jones, Lorde, Morrison, Sanchez, Walker, etc…]
1991 Arac and Ritvo, Eds. Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature
1991 Best and Kellner Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations [“Marxism, Feminism…Political Postmodernism,” “…Critical Social Theory”…]
1991 Carol Gelderman, Ed. Conversations with Mary McCarthy
1991 Christopher T. Harvie The Centre of Things: Political Fiction in Britain from Disraeli to the Present
1991 Philomena Mariani Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing [“The Novel’s Next Step” by Maxine Hong Kingston (“Global novel”)]
1991 Paula Rabinowitz Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression American
1991 Margaret Randall Walking to the Edge: Essays of Resistance [“Art as Information”…]
1991 Ruland and Bradbury From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature [“Muckrakers…” “Radical Reassessments”…]
1991 Thomas H. Schaub American Fiction in the Cold War
1992 David Cayley Northrop Frye in Conversation
1992 Morris Dickstein Double Agent: The Critic and Society
1992 Jane DeRose Evans The Art Of Persuasion: Political Propaganda From Aeneas To Brutus
1992 Maureen Whitebrook Ed. Reading Political Stories: Representations of Politics in Novels and Pictures
1992 Winn and Alexander, Eds. The Slaughter-House of Mammon: An Anthology of Victorian Social Protest Literature
1993 Barbara Foley Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 [“Art or Propaganda?” “…Didacticism”…]
1993 Toni Morrison Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
1993 Tobin Siebers Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism
1993 Gore Vidal United States: Essays 1952-1992
1994 Dorothy Allison Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature [“Believing in Literature”…]
1994 Carol Becker, Ed. The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility [“Decolonizing the Imagination”…]
1994 Harold Bloom The Western Canon
1994 G. W. Bowersock Fiction as History: Nero to Julian
1994 Richard Chapple, Ed. Social and Political Change in Literature and Film
1994 Michael Hanne Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change [revised edition, 1996?]
1994 H. L. Mencken A Second Mencken Chrestomathy [Essays, 1916-1948]
1994 Edward Said Culture and Imperialism
1994 Edward Said Representations of the Intellectuals [“Speaking Truth to Power”…]
1994 Williams and Chrisman, Eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader
1995 Becker and Wiens, Eds. The Artist in Society: Rights, Roles, and Responsibilities [“…the Crisis of Democracy,” “Democracy and…the Artist”…]
1995 David Bell Ardent Propaganda: Miners’ Novels And Class Conflict 1929-1939
1995 Dick and Singh, Eds. Conversations with Ishmael Reed
1995 Mark Edmundson Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defense of Poetry
1995 Stanley Fish Political Correctness: Studies and Political Change [“Disciplinary Tasks and Political Intentions”…]
1995 Sharon M. Harris, Ed. Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797-1901 [“Literary Politics and the Political Novel”…]
1995 Alfred Kazin Writing Was Everything
1995 Judith K. Proud Children And Propaganda: Fiction And Fairy Tale In Vichy France
1995 Anne C. Ruderman The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen
1995 Mary Ellen Snodgrass Encyclopedia of Utopian Literature
1996 Nelson Algren Nonconformity: Writing on Writing
1996 Josephine M. Guy The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual, and Communal Life
1996 Horton and Baumeister Literature and the Political Imagination
1996 Russell Reising Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text [“The Political Work of Disney’s Dumbo”…]
1996 David H. Richter Narrative/Theory [“Richard Wright: ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’ ”…]
1996 Nora Ruth Roberts Three Radical Women Writers: Class and Gender in Meridel le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst
1996 Mary Ellen Snodgrass Encyclopedia of Satirical Literature
1997 Toby Clark Art And Propaganda In The Twentieth Century: The Political Image In The Age Of Mass Culture
1997 Mark Edmundson Nightmare on Elm Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of the Gothic
1997 Bettina Friedl, Ed. On To Victory: Propaganda Plays Of The Woman Suffrage Movement
1997 Nibir K. Ghosh Calculus of Power: Modern American Political Novel
1997 Hassler and Wilcox, Eds. Political Science Fiction
1998 James Baldwin Collected Essays [selections, beginning 1949]
1998 Robert Cole, Ed. International Encyclopedia Of Propaganda
1998 Ursula Lord Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Political and Epistemological Implications of Narrative…
1998 Richard Rorty Achieving Our Country [“The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature”…]
1998 Alice Walker Anything We Love Can Be Saved
1998 John Whalen-Bridge Political Fiction and the American Self [“The Problem of the American Political Novel”…]
1998 Mary Whitby Propaganda Of Power: The Role Of Panegyric In Late Antiquity
1999 Dorrit Cohn The Distinction of Fiction
1999 Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed. African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 [“1895-1954: Art or Propaganda?” “1955-1975: Cultural Autonomy…”…]
1999 Robert Fulford The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture [“Literature of the Streets…the Shaping of News”…]
1999 Gordon Hutner, Ed. American Literature, American Culture [“Everybody’s Protest Novel” (J. Baldwin), “Harriet Beecher Stowe” (E. Wilson)”…]
1999 Clifford Siskin The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830
1999 Nuria Vilanova Social Change and Literature in Peru: 1970-1990
1999 James Wood The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief [“Legacy of…Renan and…Arnold,” “Against Paranoia:…Don DeLillo”]
2000 Joan Acocella Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism [“Politics and Criticism”…]
2000 Camille Bacon-Smith Science Fiction Culture
2000 H. Bruce Franklin Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
2000 Christopher Hitchens Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
2000 Kathryn Hume American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction Since 1960 [“The Fragility of Democracy”…]
2000 David Laskin Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals
2000 Michael McKeon, Ed. Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach
2000 Laura Miller The salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors: …The Most Fascinating Writers of Our Time
2000 Winston Napier, Ed. African American Literary Theory: A Reader
2000 Christina Stansell American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century;
2000 Lionel Trilling The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent: Selected Essays
2001 Susan Johnston Women and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political Fiction
2001 Elizabeth Maslen Political and Social Issues in British Women’s Fiction, 1928-1968
2001 Elizabeth Morgan Aeroplane Mirrors: Personal and Political Reflexivity in Post-Colonial Women’s Novels
2001 Margaret Scanlan Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction
2002 Bill Ashcroft, et. al. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
2002 Margaret Atwood Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
2002 Brenda Ayers Frances Trollope and the Novel of Social Change
2002 Maxwell Geismar Reluctant Radical: A Memoir [“From Liberalism to Radicalism”…]
2002 Karin Verena Gunnemann Heinrich Mann’s Novels and Essays: The Artist as Political Educator
2002 Amy Kaplan The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture [“Romancing the Empire”…]
2002 B. R. Meyers A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose
2002 Louis Pizzitola Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, And Propaganda In The Movies
2003 Ralph Ellison The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
2003 H. Bruce Franklin Introduction to The Iron Heel by Jack London
2003 Marjorie Garber A Manifesto for Literary Studies
2003 Thomas J. Kemme Patterns of Power in American Political Fiction
2003 Todd Oakley Lutes Shipwreck and Deliverance: Politics, Culture and Modernity in the novels of [Paz, Marquez and Llosa]
2003 George Plimpton, Ed. Latin American Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews
2003 Howard Zinn Artists in Times of War and Other Essays
2004 Dale Peck Hatchet Jobs: Cutting Through Contemporary Literature
2004 James Wood The Irresponsible Self: Laughter and the Novel
2005 Patrick J. Deneen Reading America: The Politics of Art and the Art of Politics
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See also:
by Tony Christini
1960 Leslie A. Fiedler Love and Death in the American Novel [revised 1966]
1961 Daniel Aaron Writers on the Left
1961 Adler and Cain, Eds. Imaginative Literature I: From Homer to Shakespeare
1961 Wayne C. Booth The Rhetoric of Fiction
1961 Ihab Hassan Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel
1961 Mary McCarthy On the Contrary [“Politics and the Social Scene,” “The Fact in Fiction”…]
1961 Rubin and Moore, Eds. The Idea of an American Novel
1962 Adler and Cain, Eds. Imaginative Literature II: From Cervantes to Dostoevsky
1962 Maxwell Geismar Henry James and the Jacobites
1962 Gregor and Nicholas The Moral and the Story
1962 Alvin B. Kernan Modern Satire [“Philip Wylie: A Specimen American Institution”…]
1962 Edwin Muir The Estate of Poetry [“The Public and the Poet,” “The Natural Estate,” “Criticism and the Poet”…]
1963 Donohue and Algren Conversations with Nelson Algren [“Where is the American Radical?” “The Open Society”…]
1963 Northrop Frye The Well-Tempered Critic
1963 Vernon Hall, Jr. A Short History of Literary Criticism
1963 Eloise K. Hay The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study
1963 Frank O’Connor The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story
1963 Robert E. Spiller, Ed., et al Literary History of the United States: History [“Fiction and Social Debate,” “The Hope of Reform,” “Battle of the Books”…]
1964 Walter Allen Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel From the Twenties to Our Time
1964 Ralph Ellison Shadow and Act
1964 Alberto S. Florentino Literature and Society: A Symposium on the Relation of Literature to Social Change
1964 Northrop Frye The Educated Imagination
1964 Michael Millgate American Social Fiction: James to Cozzens
1964 R. H. Tawney The Radical Tradition: Twelve Essays on Politics, Education, Literature [“Social History and Literature”…]
1966 Joseph L. Blotner The Modern American Political Novel: 1900-1960 [“The Novel of the Future,” “The Role of Woman,” “American Fascism”…]
1966 Gordon Milne The American Political Novel
1966 Scholes and Kellogg The Nature of Narrative
1967 Louis Kampf On Modernism: The Prospects for Literature and Freedom
1967 Connor Cruise O’Brien Writers and Politics: Essays and Criticisms
1967 Herbert Read Art and Alienation: The Role of the Artist in Society [“The Function of the Arts in Contemporary Society,” “Van Gogh…”…]
1967 Louis D. Rubin The Teller in the Tale
1967 George Steiner Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman [“Marxism and Literature”…]
1968 Jose Ortega Y. Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature
1968 Arthur Pollard Anthony Trollope’s Political Novels
1968 Mark Schorer The World We Imagine: Selected Essays
1969 Joseph North The New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties [“The Writer and Society,” “Writing and War”…]
1969 Flannery O’Connor Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose [“The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” “Novelist and Believer”…]
1969 Kenneth Rexroth Classics Revisited
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1970 Maxwell Geismar Mark Twain: An American Prophet [“The Enraged Radical”…]
1970 Kampf and Lauter, Eds. The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays on the Teaching of English
1970 George Perkins, Ed. The Theory of the American Novel [“Frank Norris: The Novel with a Purpose”…]
1970 Kenneth Rexroth The Alternative Society: Essays from the Other World
1970 Raymond Williams The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence
1971 Hazard Adams, Ed. Critical Theory Since Plato
1971 Sheila Delany, Ed. Counter-Tradition: The Literature of Dissent and Alternatives
1971 Jonah Raskin The Mythology of Imperialism [“Chaos: The Culture of Imperialism,” “Portrait of the Artist as Imperialist”…]
1971 Judy Kay Ferguson Salinas Social Reform in Selected Works of Carlos Fuentes
1971 Elaine Showalter Women’s Liberation and Literature
1972 David Lodge Twentieth Century Literary Criticism [“Politics and the English Language” (Orwell), “Why Write?” (Sartre)…]
1972 Norman Philbrick, Ed. Trumpets Sounding: Propaganda Plays Of The American Revolution
1973 Richard Kostelanetz The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America
1974 Jo David Bellamy The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers
1974 David Craig The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change
1974 Greenberg and Warrick Political Science Fiction: An Introductory Reader
1974 John Halperin, Ed. The Theory of the Novel: New Essays
1975 Ian Boyd The Novels Of G.K. Chesterton: A Study In Art And Propaganda
1975 Terry Eagleton Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory [“Ideology and Literary Form,” “Marxism and Aesthetic Value”…]
1975 Lucien Goldmann Towards a Sociology of the Novel [English translation]
1975 Phillip Roth Reading Myself and Others [expanded, 2001] [“Writing American Fiction”…]
1976 Terry Eagleton Marxism and Literary Criticism [“The Writer and Commitment,” “The Author as Producer”…]
1976 Gilbert Highet The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning
1976 Richard Ohmann English in American: A Radical View of the Profession [updated 1996] [“The Politics of Knowledge: A Polemic”…]
1976 Norman Rudich Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition
1976 David C. Stineback Shifting World: Social Change and Nostalgia in the American Novel
1976 Mas’ud Zavarzadeh The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel
1977 Mary Lee Bundy Guide to the Literature of Social Change: Volume 1
1977 Bob Dixon Catching Them Young 1: Sex, Race and Class in Children’s Fiction
1977 Bob Dixon Catching Them Young 2: Political Ideas in Children’s Fiction
1977 Herbert Marcuse The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics
1977 Mark Spilka Towards a Poetics of Fiction: Essays from Novel—A Forum on Fiction, 1967-1976
1977 Diana Trilling We Must March My Darlings
1977 Raymond Williams Marxism and Literature
1978 John Colmer Coleridge to Catch-22: Images of Society [“Utopian Fanatasy,” “Protest and Anti-War Literature”…]
1978 John Gardner On Moral Fiction
1978 Josephine Hendin Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945
1978 Tillie Olsen Silences [“Rebecca Harding Davis”…]
1978 Philip Rahv Essays on Literature and Politics, 1932-1972
1978 Edward Said Orientalism
1978 David Smith Socialist Propaganda In The Twentieth-Century Novel
1978 Eudora Welty The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews [“Must the Novelist Crusade?”]
1979 Johnson and Johnson Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century
1979 Raghuvir Sinah Social Change in Contemporary Literature
________________________________________________________________
1980 Frank Lentricchia After the New Criticism
1980/85 Ira A. Levine Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in the American Theatre
1980 John Lucas The Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth Century Provincial Novel
1980 Mary McCarthy Ideas and the Novel
1981 M. M. Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays [English translation] [ “Discourse in the Novel”…]
1981 Rosemary Jackson Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion
1982 Margaret Atwood Second Words: Selected Critical Prose [“Amnesty International: An Address”…]
1983 Malcolm Bradbury The Modern American Novel [revised edition, 1992: novels 1890-1990s]
1983 Terry Eagleton Literary Theory: An Introduction [“Conclusion: Political Criticism”…”]
1983 A. P. Foulkes Literature And Propaganda [“What is Propaganda?” “…Literary Communication,” “Fiction and Reality”…]
1983 John J. Michalczyk Costa-Gavras: The Political Fiction Film
1983 Nicholas Pronay, Ed. Propaganda, Politics And Film, 1918-45
1983 Susan Rubin Suleiman Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre
1983 Janet Todd, Ed. Women Writers Talking
1984 Robert Alter Motives for Fiction [“…American Political Novel,” “History…New American Novel,” “Literature and Ideology in the Thirties”…]
1984 Madeline Moore The Short Season Between Two Silences: The Mystical and the Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf
1984 Christopher Pawling Popular Fiction and Social Change
1984 Charles Ruas Conversations with American Writers
1984 H. Trivedi American Political Novel
1984 Michael Wilding Political Fictions [“1984: Rewriting the Future,” “News From Nowhere,” “The Iron Heel,” “…Huckleberry Finn”…]
1985 Robert Boyers Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945 [“Toward a Reading of Political Novels”…]
1985 Malcolm Cowley The Flower and the Leaf: A Contemporary Record of American Writing Since 1941
1985 Wallace Gray Homer to Joyce: Interpretations of the Classic Works of Western Literature
1985 Mary McCarthy Occasional Prose [“Politics and the Novel,” “ ‘Democracy’ ”…]
1985 Judith Newton Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture
1985 Emmanuel Ngara Art And Ideology In The African Novel: A Study Of The Influence Of Marxism On African Writing
1985 Mona Scheuermann Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel
1985 Elaine Showalter, Ed. The New Feminist Criticism: …Women, Literature, Theory [“…Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History”…]
1985 Michael Spindler American Literature and Social Change: William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller
1986 Ralph Ellison Going to the Territory
1986 Barbara Foley Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction
1986 Hobbs and Woodard, Eds. Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Art and Social Change
1986 Milan Kundera The Art of the Novel
1986 Russell Reising The Unusable Past: Theory and Study of American Literature [“The Apolitical Unconscious: Leslie Fiedler”…]
1986 Judi M. Roller The Politics of the Feminist Novel
1986 Thomas Daniel Young, Ed. Conversations with Malcolm Cowley
1987 Nancy Armstrong Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
1987 Miklόs Haraszti The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism
1987 Tom Kemme Political Fiction, The Spirit of the Age, and Allen Drury
1987 Richard Ohmann The Politics of Letters
1987 Irme Salusinszky Criticism in Society: Interviews with Derrida, Frye, Bloom, Hartman, Kermode, Said, Johnson, Lentricchia, Miller
1988 K. E. Agovi Novels of Social Change
1988 Rosemarie Bodenheimer The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction
1988 Mary Chamberlain, Ed. Writing Lives: Conversations Between Women Writers
1988 Terrence Des Pres Praises and Dispraises: Poetry and Politics, the 20th Century [“Political Intrusion”…]
1988 Emory Elliott, Ed. Columbia Literary History of the United States
1988 Nadine Gordimer The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places
1988 Hoffman and Murphy, Eds. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction
1988 Amy Kaplan The Social Construction of American Realism
1988 Vincent B. Leitch American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties [“Leftist Criticism From the 1960s to the 1980s”…]
1988 J. Michael Lennon Conversations with Norman Mailer
1988 David Lodge, Ed. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader [updated 2000, with Nigel Wood]
1988 George Plimpton, Ed. Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews [revised edition, 1998]
1988 Yanarella and Sigelman Political Mythology and Popular Fiction
1989 Peter Buitenhuis The Great War Of Words: British, American, And Canadian Propaganda And Fiction, 1914-1933
1989 Cathy N. Davidson, Ed. Reading in American: Literature and Social History
1989 Rita Felski Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change
1989 Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier Interviews with Latin American Writers
1989 Linda Hutcheon The Politics of Postmodernism
1989 Kenneth Rexroth More Classics Revisited
1989 John Rodden The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St. George” Orwell
1989 Standley and Pratt, Eds. Conversations with James Baldwin
1989 D. J. Taylor A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s [“Writers, Politics and Society,” “Outside the Whale”…]
1990 TO 2003 BIBLIOGRAPHY CONTENTS
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1930 Ransom, Tate, Warren, et al I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners
1931 Edmund Wilson Axel’s Castle: A Study in Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
1932 V. F. Calverton The Liberation of American Literature [“The Puritan Myth,” “From Revolution to Reaction,” “…Nationalism,” “Liberation”…]
1932 Virginia Woolf The Second Common Reader [“How Should One Read a Book?”…]
1933 Granville Hicks The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War
1934 John Dewey Art as Experience [“Art and Civilization”…]
1934 Max Eastman Art and the Life of Action (With Other Essays) [“The Artist and the Social Engineer”…]
1934 Max Eastman Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism [“The New American Literature,” “The Marxian Aesthetics”…]
1934 Henry James The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces
1935 Granville Hicks, Ed., et al Proletarian Literature in the United States [“Introduction,” Joseph Freeman, “…Problems of Revolutionary Literature”…]
1936 T. S. Eliot Essays Ancient and Modern [“Religion and Literature,” “Modern Education and the Classics”…]
1936 James T. Farrell A Note on Literary Criticism [“Literature and Propaganda,” “Left-Wing Dualism,” “Marx on the Relative Aesthetic”…]
1936 Allen Tate Reactionary Essays
1937 Mary M. Colum From These Roots: The Ideas that Have Made Modern Literature [reprinted, 1967]
1937 Morton D. Zabel, Ed. Literary Opinion in America; Volumes I and II. [revised, 1962]
1937 Herbert Read Art and Society
1938 Edmund Wilson The Triple Thinkers [revised, 1948; corrected, 1963] [“The Politics of Flaubert,” “Historical Interpretation of Literature”…]
1939 Granville Hicks Figures of Transition: A Study of British Literature at the End of the 19th Century [“Socialism and William Morris”…]
1939 Bernard L. Smith Forces in American Criticism: A Study in the History of American Literary Thought [“The Rise of Critical Traditions”…]
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1940 Roger Dataller The Plain Man and the Novel [“The Novel as Propaganda,” “The Historical Novel,” “The Social Novel”…]
1941 Joseph Warren Beach American Fiction, 1920-1940 [“John Steinbeck: Art and Propaganda”…]
1941 Kenneth Burke The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action [revised, 1973] [“The Nature of Art Under Capitalism”…]
1941 Van Wyck Brooks On Literature Today
1941 Sterling A. Brown, Ed., et al The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes [new introduction by Lester, 1969]
1941 Edmund Wilson The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature [revised, 1952]
1942 Alfred Kazin On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature [“Criticism at the Poles”…]
1943 Herbert Read The Politics of the Unpolitical
1943 Edmund Wilson, Ed. The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It;
Volumes I and II [revised, 1955]
1946 Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
1946 Alex Comfort Art and Social Responsibility: Lectures on the Ideology of Romanticism
1946 George Orwell Dickens, Dali and Others
1946 George Orwell “Why I Write,” in A Collection of Essays, 1954
1946 Mark Schorer William Blake: The Politics of Vision
1947 E.B. Burgum The Novel and the World’s Dilemma
1947 Engels and Marx Literature and Art: Selections from Their Writings
1947 Maxwell Geismar Writers in Crisis: The American Novel, 1925-1940
1947 Stanley Edgar Hyman The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism [revised, 1955] [“The Ideal Critic,” “The Actual Critic”…]
1947 Herbert Read The Grass Roots of Art: Lectures on Social Aspects of Art in an Industrial Age
1947 Herbert Read Education Through Art
1948 Walter Allen Writers on Writing [“The Ends and Uses of Poetry,” “The Novelist’s Responsibility”…]
1948 Alex Comfort The Novel and Our Time [“The Concept of Responsibility”…]
1948 F. R. Leavis The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
1948 Mark Schorer, Ed., et al Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgement
1949 Maxwell Geismar The Last of the Provincials: The American Novel, 1915-1925
1949 H. L. Mencken A Mencken Chrestomathy [Essays, 1916-1948] “The Critical Process,” etc.
1949 Edwin Muir Essays on Literature and Society [Enlarged and Revised, 1965]
1949 Wellek and Warren Theory of Literature [“Literature and Society”…]
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1950 Gilbert Highet The Art of Teaching [“Authors and Artists”…]
1950 Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society [“The Meaning of a Literary Idea”…]
1952 Edmund Wilson A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950
1952 Edmund Wilson The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the 1920s and 1930s [“Literary Class War,” “American Critics, Left and Right”…]
1953 M. H. Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
1953 Isaiah Berlin The Hedgehog and the Fox [Revised, 1978]
1953 Van Wyck Brooks The Writer in America
1953 Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. Norms for the Novel [“Literature as a Moral Activity, …as Fundamentally Religious, …as Inspiration”…]
1953 Maxwell Geismar Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel, 1890-1915 [“Jack London”…]
1953 Gilbert Highet Juvenal the Satirist
1954 Walter Allen The English Novel: A Short Critical History
1955 James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son [“Everybody’s Protest Novel”…]
1955 Joseph L. Blotner The Political Novel
1956 J. M. Cohen A History of Western Literature
1956 Frank O’Connor The Mirror in the Roadway: A Study of the Modern Novel
1956 Walter B. Rideout The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society [“Class War”…]
1957 Richard Chase The American Novel and Its Tradition [“Norris and Naturalism”…]
1957 Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism
1957 Granville Hicks, Ed. The Living Novel: A Symposium [“Ralph Ellison: Society, Morality, and the Novel”…]
1957 Irving Howe Politics and the Novel [“The Idea of the Political Novel,” “Orwell: History as Nightmare”…]
1957 Wright Morris The Territory Ahead: Critical Interpretations in American Literature
1957 Philip Rahv, Ed. Literature in America: An Anthology of Literary Criticism
1957 Ian Watt The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding
1957 Rebecca West The Court and the Castle: A Study of the Interactions of Religious and Political Ideas in Imaginative Literature
1957 Wimsatt and Brooks Literary Criticism: A Short History [“The Real and the Social: Art as Propaganda”…]
1958 M. H. Abrams, Ed. Literature and Belief: English Institute Essays, 1957
1958 Malcolm Cowley, Ed. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series
1958 Edmund Fuller Man in Modern Fiction: Some Minority Opinions on Contemporary American Writing
1958 Maxwell Geismar American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity [“Higher and Higher Criticism,” “The ‘End’ of Naturalism”…]
1959 Miriam Allott Novelists on the Novel [“No Politics?” (Stendhal), “The Writer’s Responsibility” (G. Eliot), “Ethics of the Novel” (various)…]
1959 William R. Mueller The Prophetic Voice in Modern Fiction: Major Writings of Joyce, Camus, Kafka, Silone, Faulkner, Green
1960-1989 BIBLIOGRAPHY CONTENTS
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by Saul Landau
The obituaries on Norman Mailer offer little or no space to his literary contribution that offers unique insight into the Cold War. Harlot’s Ghost explored the U.S.-Soviet clash as no historian or sociologist dared — or had the capacity to probe.
Compare the material at the fiction journal Liberation Lit to what the literary establishment generally considers to be accomplished writing, accomplished art. What you find at Lib Lit is perhaps less nuance and more weight, typically; thus largely an artistic equivalence, at the least – though differently focused in crucial ways.
Basically, you’ll find quality writing and aesthetics at Lib Lit, well-researched, incorporating a wide variety of approaches. You’ll find crucial qualities of art that the literary world typically neglects, marginalizes, decries, and censors in many ways that serve to maintain an unjust status quo. Libratory lit breaks out of that.
Regardless, tastes will differ.
From HNN:
Peter La Chapelle, Assistant Professor in the History Program at Nevada State College and author of Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California, analyzes the historical connections between country music and left-wing and right-wing politics:
Perhaps the national amnesia about country’s liberal, populist, and leftwing roots will fade as artists as varied in politics and style as Merle Haggard, Iris DeMent, Willie Nelson, the Old Crow Medicine Show, Butch Hancock, I See Hawks in L.A., Bobby Braddock, Tom Snider, Nanci Griffith, Steve Earle, and Allison Moorer sing out against the Iraq War, or other more mainstream artists such as Tim McGraw and Tracy Lawrence bemoan its consequences.
A Practical Policy 