Afterlives of Modernism: Liberalism, Transnationalism, and Political Critique

241 Pages·2011·0.823 MB·English

by  John Carlos Rowe

afterlives of modernism
re-mapping the transnational
A Dartmouth Series in American Studies
series editor
Donald E. Pease
Avalon Foundation Chair of Humanities
Founding Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute
Dartmouth College
The emergence of Transnational American Studies in the wake of the Cold War
marks the most significant reconfiguration of American studies since its incep-
tion. The shock waves generated by a newly globalized world order demanded
an understanding of America’s embeddedness within global and local processes
rather than scholarly reaffirmations of its splendid isolation. The series Re-
Mapping the Transnational seeks to foster the cross-national dialogues needed
to sustain the vitality of this emergent field. To advance a truly comparativist
understanding of this scholarly endeavor, Dartmouth College Press welcomes
monographs from scholars both inside and outside the United States.
For a complete list of books available in this series, see www.upne.com.
Lene M. Johannessen, Horizons of Enchantment: Essays in the American
Imaginary
John Carlos Rowe, Afterlives of Modernism: Liberalism, Transnationalism,
and Political Critique
Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom
Bernd Herzogenrath, An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach
Johannes Voelz, Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and
Emerson’s Challenge
John Carlos Rowe
A F T E R L I V E S O F
M O D E R N I S M
Liberalism,
Transnationalism, and
Political Critique
dartmouth college press
hanover, new hampshire
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5 4 3 2 1
Rememory: Lindon Barrett: Friend
To borrow from Alex Haley’s Roots (1976),
he helped “alleviate the legacies of the fact that
preponderantly the histories have been written
by the winners.”

contents
Preface ix
Introduction: The Inevitable Intimate Connection 1
part i liberal modernism and transnationalism
1 Naming What Is Inside: Gertrude Stein’s Use of Names
in Three Lives 27
2 John Dos Passos’s Imaginary City in Manhattan Transfer 61
3 Faulkner and the Southern Arts of Mystification in
Absalom, Absalom! 75
4 Our Invisible Man: The Aesthetic Genealogy of U.S. Diversity 96
part ii postwar liberalism and
the new cosmopolitanism
5 Racism, Fetishism, and the Gift Economy in Harper Lee’s
To Kill a Mockingbird 121
6 Alien Encounter: Thomas Berger’s Neighbors as a Critique
of Existential Humanism 143
7 Buried Alive: The Native American Political Unconscious in
Louise Erdrich’s Fiction 163
8 Neoliberalism and the U.S. Literary Canon: The Example of
Philip Roth 187
Bibliography 209
Index 219

preface
All the chapters in this book were published previously as scholarly essays
between 1983 and 2010. Three of the chapters were published outside
the U.S. in Germany (chapter 2), Australia (chapter 7), and Italy (chapter
8) and thus have had little circulation in the U.S. The origins of most of
these essays bear upon the central argument of the book and on my own
cultural politics. All of the original essays, except for the essay on Ger-
trude Stein, were commissioned by editors of journals or books, usually
on specific authors and in some cases specific texts. It is fair to conclude
that these editors approached me because they considered my previous
work to qualify me to write about these authors and texts. Some editors
undoubtedly judged me to be a liberal capable of writing on liberal au-
thors and texts. Others explicitly asked me, as Alice Hall Petry did when
commissioning my essay on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, to write
a leftist interpretation of a liberal text. Alice was kind enough to express
her admiration of my essay on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which is a
materialist analysis of the socio-economic relations in that novel.1
Dangerous as it is to judge one’s own political or scholarly perspec-
tive, I identified myself as a leftist while writing all of these essays, except
for the 1983 essay on Thomas Berger, which has been extensively revised
for this book, in part because of the dated qualities of the original essay.
I certainly began my scholarly career as a liberal, who wrote about pri-
marily canonical, white male authors. Henry Adams and Henry James
were the subjects of my first published book, Henry Adams and Henry
James, an early example of the relevance of Continental deconstruction
to American literature.2 In the 1970s deconstruction was considered a
radical philosophy, but its political significance was contested. During
the Culture Wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, neoconservatives