Amateur Modernism

230 Pages·2013·1.19 MB·English

by  Daniel Harney

Amateur Modernism: Literary Responses to Professional Society
by
Daniel Harney
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of English
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Daniel Harney 2013
Amateur Modernism: Literary Responses to Professional Society
Daniel Harney
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of English
University of Toronto
2013
Abstract
Amateur Modernism argues that the rise of professional society during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century triggered efforts to revivify and renovate the ostensibly anachronistic
concept of amateurism. This project investigates how four modernist writers—Ford Madox
Ford, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dashiell Hammett—all employed the concept of
amateurism in their work to signal not a rejection of professionalism, but a struggle against the
codified systems and habits of mind it tended to produce. As I demonstrate, many modernist
texts position amateurism and professionalism in a productive tension, combining the amateur
pursuit of wide-ranging knowledge, pleasurable work, and improvisational thought, with the
financial independence and expertise afforded by professional training. Modernists were often
ambivalent about the promises of professionalism and invoked amateur attitudes they believed
could repair cultural fragmentation, democratize learning, and make working life more
pleasurable.
Chapter One argues that Ford, ambivalently caught between his German ancestry and his
work writing wartime propaganda for the British government, appealed to amateurism as broad
general knowledge transcending national borders, and enabling him to negotiate the tensions
between the patriotism that was demanded of him and the cosmopolitanism he admired. Chapter
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Two considers amateurism as a spontaneous and rambling habit of mind as it focuses upon
Woolf’s efforts to incorporate amateurism into higher education and the professions by
encouraging women, who were becoming professionals for the first time, to maintain their
capacity to think in non-hierarchical and unspecialized ways. Chapter Three understands
amateurism as a bridging impulse as it focuses on Hurston’s attempt to make disciplinary
cultural anthropology accessible to a popular audience. Chapter Four examines how Hammett,
inspired by the pleasurable work of the gentleman-amateur, argued that lower-middle class
workers like his detective characters might covertly derive wry pleasure by improvising between
the cracks of professional bureaucracies. By emphasizing the malleability of amateurism and
professionalism during the modernist period, this dissertation offers a critique of scholarship that
reads contemporary, calcified oppositions between the professions and amateurism back onto
modernist debates.
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Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks goes first and foremost to Melba Cuddy-Keane for her devotion to this project
over a number of years. Her rigorous attention to detail and her generosity were not only crucial
to this project, but also modeled a type of scholarship I aim to practice myself. Thanks as well to
Sarah Wilson and Deidre Lynch for their commitment to this project and my related endeavors.
In addition, I am grateful for Sean Latham’s excellent suggestions and participation in the
defence of this thesis.
My love and thanks to my parents, Jane and Michael Harney, to whom I owe my
academic success. Thanks to Glenn Clifton, Camilla Eckbo, Kai Hainer, Colin Loughran, and
Brandon McFarlane, for your years of friendship. (Glenn, our carrel conversations kept me sane
and amused even if we never did perfect a means of communication between them.) Thanks as
well to Lisa Betel, Elizabeth Dickens, John McQuillen, Spencer Morrison, Alex Peat, and Emily
Simmons for your professional and friendly advice and support. Finally, a debt of gratitude goes
to my husband, Justin Ridley, for his many years of love, encouragement, and patience.

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Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter One:
“I never had much sense of nationality”: Ford Madox Ford’s
Cosmopolitan Amateurism………………………………………………………………………31

Chapter Two:
“This new weapon”: Virginia Woolf’s Transformation of the Professional Mind………………77

Chapter Three:
Negotiating the Boundaries of Academia: Reconsidering the “Professional”
Zora Neale Hurston……………………………………………………………………………..122

Chapter Four:
“It’s a job I like, and I’m going to do it”: Pleasurable Work in Dashiell Hammett’s
Bureaucratic America…………………………………………………………………………..155

Conclusion:
From Fears of “Professionalization” to Fears of “Deprofessionalization”……………………..193

References………………………………………………………………………………………199

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Introduction
In 1904, between appointments at Princeton and Harvard, literary scholar and editor of
the Atlantic Monthly Bliss Perry published a small collection of essays titled The Amateur Spirit.
As Perry explains in his Preface, the unifying element of the disparate essays is an attempt to
trace “the significance of the amateur spirit in carrying forward the daily work of our modern
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world” (vii). He continues, “I have endeavored to illustrate from many fields—from sport and
politics, from science and letters—the possibility of combining the professional’s skill with the
zest and enthusiasm of the amateur.” On the one hand, he acknowledges the critical importance
of “the mechanical conveniences and equipments [. . .] [that] have been wrought out for us by the
most patient, the most concentrated activity of professionals” (27). On the other, he speaks to
the importance of combining the strengths of professionalism with those of amateurism:
amateurism counteracts the worst traits of the professional, namely greed and narrowness of
mind, by cultivating a “plasticity of mind” that “touches life on many sides” (14, 24). His essays
were part of a larger debate in America around the turn of the century regarding the future of
higher education. While influential scholars like the first president of Johns Hopkins University,
Daniel Coit Gilman, believed the key to modernizing America’s small religious colleges lay in
modeling them on the specialized German research universities, others like Irving Babbitt,
Charles Eliot Norton, and Perry himself, believed that the way forward was to focus upon

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Perry’s use of the term “spirit” accords with Michael Warner’s account of the resistance to professional literary
study during the modernist period: “Humanism, platonism, and Christianity provided powerful grounds for thinking
of literature as the locus, in the college curriculum, of truth, the ideal, and the spiritual. Thought of this way,
literature could be said to be beyond the reach of mere specialists” (7).
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teaching the values of humanism and a general body of knowledge. The latter camp composed
what Gerald Graff has termed “the generalist opposition” and what I term, taking my cue from
the terminology of the period, an “amateur” approach to scholarship and pedagogy (81). We see
such an approach not only in the argument of The Amateur Spirit, but also in its structure:
Perry’s apology that the essays within are “piled almost at random” is difficult to read as
anything other than a challenge to the narrowness of academic scholarship (vii). In Perry’s
conception, amateurism wasn’t to be perceived as a less competent alternative to the
professional, but rather, as an admirable trait that could aid national ambitions when
complemented with the technological and scientific expertise of the professional. As he
explains, amateur traits “will be even more valuable in the future than in the past, if they are
employed to supplement, rather than to be substituted for, the solid achievements of professional
industry” (30). Writing at the beginning of the new century when distinctions between old and
new habits of mind had a heightened resonance, Perry tacitly suggests that both amateurism and
professionalism are distinctly new ways to engage with the modern world.
Perry’s belief that amateur sensibilities must be incorporated into (rather than opposed to)
the values of an emerging professional society was neither anomalous during the modernist
period nor limited to the United States. In a 1932 international symposium on the future of
higher education organized by the League of Nations, professor of political science at Cambridge
University, Ernest Barker, used similar terms to describe recent changes in British society:
One of the features of the intellectual life of Great Britain, even as late as the middle of the
reign of Queen Victoria, was the predominance of the amateur. It was not the professional

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Perry presents an interesting case because while he studied in the German research universities at Heidelberg and
Strasbourg, he remained skeptical of the philological and scientific approaches to literary study he encountered and
instead, began considering the merits of amateurism.
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professor, but the private scholar, who made our learning and our culture. [. . .] [A]s
learning has become more specialized, it has also become more professionalized: the
universities and their teachers are ousting, or have ousted, the amateur. [. . .] The change
was inevitable; but perhaps it has not been, in all respects, a change for the better. The
professional historian may be more thorough than the amateur, but he may also have less
contact with national life, and less understanding of its problems. [. . .] One of the great
duties of the university teacher is to remain a man in becoming a scholar, and to keep a rich
humanity at the same time that he acquires a large erudition. (Barker 93-94)
Barker, like Perry, suggests that society is best served by the presence of both amateur and
professional traits; each ought to be seen as dependent upon the other because each is limited in
its capacity to respond to the demands of modernity. Further, both Perry and Barker suggest that
the distinction between one’s profession and one’s wider interests as a citizen—one’s “rich
humanity”—ought not to be too strictly separated; insights derived from professional and private
life are made richer through symbiotic exchange. Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, the
expanding influence of professional ideology, which scholars have since described as the rise of
“professional society” or the “culture of professionalism,” was recognized at the time to have a
massive impact on the health of civic life. As the arguments of both men attest, during the last
decades of the nineteenth century, cultural pressures to professionalize nearly all types of work
in America, Britain, and Europe (particularly Germany) cast alternative modes of working and
thinking into stark relief.
For Perry, Barker, and other modernists, the “amateur” signified something greater than
dilettantism: it became shorthand for a desire to graft the attitudes of the emerging specialist onto
the attitudes of what Richard Sennett has described as “the public men of the 19th century” who
were able to connect the concerns of their own work with the larger cultural and political issues
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of the day (195). Amateurism for the modernists meant many things, but when it was described
in a positive fashion, it was an attempt to describe both a catholic range of knowledge catalyzed
by a native curiosity about the world, and a “sympathy” for fellow human beings that came as a
result of being able to “connect” one’s own private concerns with broader public ones. Perry and
Barker’s shared concern that professionals maintain “contact with national life” suggests their
interest in the amateur went beyond the groves of academe: they recognized that by discouraging
scholars from specializing in increasingly esoteric fields of knowledge they could have a
salubrious effect upon the very machinery of democracy.
Can these two relatively obscure passages from Perry and Barker help us to understand
how transatlantic modernist cultures interpreted the emerging forces of professionalization? I
would argue that they can: the passages are exemplary not only in their efforts to broker a
hybridized amateur / professional society, but also in the way they legitimate the category of the
“amateur” as more than the negation of the professional. My claim that we might be able to
trace broader cultural shifts in British and American modernist society through a method that
traces specific usages of a single word like “amateur” is suggestive of Raymond Williams’s
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“keywords” approach to literary historical scholarship. He argues that keywords are “ways not
only of discussing but at another level of seeing many of our central experiences” (15).
Rejecting the idea that “language simply reflects the processes of society and history,” he claims
“important social and historical processes occur within language” (22). In choosing to
foreground in this dissertation the term “amateur” rather than related terms like “generalist,”
“organic intellectual,” or more contemporary terms like “independent scholar,” I want to suggest
that the modernists’ attraction to the specific term “amateur” speaks to a distinct effort to

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I am indebted to Melba Cuddy-Keane and the other collaborators of her forthcoming Modernism: Keywords for
introducing me to Williams’s approach.
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democratize the formerly elite ability to love one’s work—as the etymology of the term
suggests—and integrate it into the increasingly specialized, standardized, and bureaucratized
logic of modern work. As I explain, the cultural history of the terms “amateur” and
“professional” confirms Williams’s argument for engaging in cultural keywords work more
generally: “changes are not always either simple or final. Earlier and later senses coexist, or
become actual alternatives in which problems of contemporary belief and affiliation are
contested” (22). While the modernist writers I examine in this dissertation all chose to partake in
professional society and recognized its benefits, they also spilled a significant amount of ink
considering whether elements of “the amateur spirit” could be incorporated into the concept of
the “professional.” The works I investigate not only reflect the historical cultural debates
regarding professional society, but also shaped those debates by offering readers new ways to
imagine how professionals might participate in public life as well as warning them of the
potentially damaging effects of professional ideology.
Amateur Modernism argues that the rise of professional culture during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century triggered efforts to theorize and advocate for the ostensibly
anachronistic concept of amateurism. Although figured differently by each of the authors I
examine, amateurism signaled not a rejection of professionalism, but a struggle against the
codified systems it tended to produce. Modernist authors and thinkers employed the concept of
amateurism in order to both influence and situate themselves within professional society. I
investigate how they constructed, subverted, and amended professional identities through a range
of techniques that all invoked the concept of the amateur. I argue that key to this endeavor was
an attempt to inscribe the pursuit of wide-ranging knowledge, pleasurable work, and
improvisational thought, into the logic of modern professional ideology, which was perceived to
be overly specialized, insipid, and standardized. One of my goals is to demonstrate that