Fantasies of the New Class

Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction

Stephen Schryer

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231527477
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

America's post–World War II prosperity created a boom in higher education, expanding the number of university-educated readers and making a new literary politics possible. Writers began to direct their work toward the growing professional class, and the American public in turn became more open to literary culture. This relationship imbued fiction with a new social and cultural import, allowing authors to envision themselves as unique cultural educators. It also changed the nature of literary representation: writers came to depict social reality as a tissue of ideas produced by knowledge elites.

Linking literary and historical trends, Stephen Schryer underscores the exalted fantasies that arose from postwar American writers' new sense of their cultural mission. Hoping to transform capitalism from within, writers and critics tried to cultivate aesthetically attuned professionals who could disrupt the narrow materialism of the bourgeoisie. Reading Don DeLillo, Marge Piercy, Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ralph Ellison, and Lionel Trilling, among others, Schryer unravels the postwar idea of American literature as a vehicle for instruction, while highlighting both the promise and flaws inherent in this vision.

1

THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

THE NEW CRITICISM, HARVARD SOCIOLOGY, AND THE IDEA OF THE UNIVERSITY

In the 1930s, two disciplinary paradigms emerged that cannily prefigured the institutional requirements of the post–World War II university and expanding new class: the New Criticism developed by southern poet-critics such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate and the structural functionalism spearheaded by Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons.¹ Both of these paradigms helped transform their disciplines into erudite yet teachable bodies of knowledge, in ways that seemed tailor made for the mass influx of students that took place in the 1940s and 1950s. In the case of the New Critics, this transformation was facilitated by their promotion of close reading as the discipline’s primary interpretive method. John Guillory and Gerald Graff, in their disciplinary histories of English literature, describe the apparently contradictory demands that the New Critics’ espousal of close reading fulfilled. On the one hand, Guillory states, it allowed the New Critics to reimagine literary language as an advanced form of cultural capital, one that imparted to texts “a certain kind of rarity, the very difficulty of apprehending them.”² On the other hand, according to Graff, close reading’s bracketing of social context seemed “ideally suited to a new, mass student body that could not be depended on to bring to the university any common cultural background.”³ Parsons’s structural functionalism fulfilled similar demands. His chief accomplishment was to develop a highly technical theoretical vocabulary, one that lent a veneer of scientificity to the discipline that it had hitherto lacked. At the same time, Parsons’s purpose was to thoroughly systematize his discipline in ways that made it more amenable to presentation in postsecondary textbooks.⁴

However, in spite of these pedagogical parallels, the two paradigms seemingly embodied different models of professionalization. In general, as Guillory argues, the humanities and social sciences underwent a process of definition by mutual exclusion in the 1940s and 1950s as each marked off its respective proximity to the hard sciences: “First, the social sciences were led to discard interpretation as much as possible from their methodological repertoire. And second, the humanities came to be identified as the disciplines whose only method was interpretation.”⁵ For the first generation of U.S. New Critics, who began their careers as Agrarian ideologues opposed to the industrialization of the South, literature was the only remaining counterweight to the triumph of technical rationality within the welfare state. Their cultivation of close reading was in part an effort to isolate this anti-instrumental dimension of literature, to shelter it from the technocratic pretensions of the new class. Hence, the New Critics rejected any approach to literary studies that seemed social scientific. Literary historicism, Allen Tate complained in 1941, “takes its definite place in the positivistic movement which, from my point of view, has been clearing the way for the slave state.”⁶ If the New Critics tried to make literary studies less sociological, Parsons conversely tried to make sociology less literary. His work represented the apogee of his discipline’s technocratic ambitions. He pushed sociology away from the interpretive tendencies of earlier paradigms such as the Chicago school and tried to refashion it as an objective science. The New Criticism and structural functionalism, in other words, pulled their disciplines to opposite poles of the professional spectrum. In Alvin Gouldner’s terms, the New Critics cultivated a purist image of themselves as traditional, humanistic intellectuals; sociologists reenvisaged themselves as potential members of the technical intelligentsia.

As I argue in this chapter, the separation of literary studies and sociology that took place under the aegis of New Criticism and structural functionalism masked underlying affinities between the two disciplines’ attitude toward the new class that critics and sociologists hoped to train within their classrooms. Both paradigms involved similar deformations of the social trustee ideology that pervaded the professional stratum in the early twentieth century. As we saw in the introduction, this ideology encompassed both technical and moral claims; the social trustee professional was a technically qualified expert dedicated to the public good. Both the New Criticism and structural functionalism attempted to synthesize these claims. The New Criticism was indeed rooted in an overt hostility toward the technocratic tendencies of the sciences and social sciences. However, the effect of the New Critics’ work was to reshape literary studies in imitation of these disciplines; the method of close reading, as John Crowe Ransom argued in “Criticism, Inc.” (1937),⁷ was supposed to make criticism more scientific—that is, more predictable and rigorous. Close reading became the discipline’s specialized techne, its claim to professional identity, and the New Critics linked this techne to the imagined moral effects of literature in modern society. Parsons’s structural functionalism similarly tried to push sociology closer to the natural sciences by excluding interpretation and fashioning a new technical vocabulary for the discipline. At the same time, his conception of the sociologist’s function was essentially humanistic and cleaved to the lineaments of the social trustee ideology. At the heart of Parsons’s byzantine theoretical edifice was the notion that social systems are held together by noninstrumental moral values that once originated from the pulpit but today come from the universities. The purpose of sociologists and other welfare-state professionals is to maintain and reproduce these values, which ensure the homeostasis of the social system.

Both paradigms thus exemplify the fracturing of social trustee ideology that took place within the post–World War II academy. In Gouldner’s scenario, the university was supposed to be the site where the disciplines would come together to perpetuate a common culture of critical discourse, thereby forging a meritocratic new class that would displace the old bourgeoisie as society’s intelligent and moral elite. Among other things, this scenario did not take into account the logic of specialization, which tended to atomize the new class rather than binding it together into a coherent social stratum. As Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich argue, “specialization was the [professional-managerial class] member’s chief selling point, the quality which justified his or her claim to a unique niche in society, but it acted as a centrifugal force on the class as a whole.”⁸ In literary studies and academic sociology, this atomization went beyond differences in technique; the social trustee synthesis of techne and morality gave rise to discipline-specific and mutually antagonistic fantasies of cultural education. These fantasies eroded social trustee professionalism’s pragmatic impetus, instead narrowly orienting it toward disciplinary self-perpetuation.

THE UNITED STATES AS UNIVERSITY

The differentiation of sociology and literary studies that began in the mid-1930s is particularly striking given that the two disciplines often overlapped in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. Before the emergence of the New Criticism and structural functionalism, many sociologists incorporated the methods and assumptions of writers into their work and vice versa. In particular, as Carla Cappetti documents, a rich cross-fertilization of sociology and literature took place in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. The dominant sociological paradigm in the United States at this time was the Chicago School of Sociology, generally remembered for its empirical studies of Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods and subcultures. This school relied on qualitative methods, especially ethnographic techniques borrowed from the Boasian tradition in anthropology. According to Cappetti, the Chicago school also borrowed from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary naturalism—especially the work of urban writers such as Émile Zola and Theodore Dreiser; this debt was particularly evident in the sociologists’ style, which relied on rich description to convey a phenomenal sense of Chicago’s communities. The Chicago sociologists in turn influenced the generation of naturalists that emerged in the 1930s—James Farrell, Nelson Algren, and Richard Wright. Hence, as we have seen, novels such as Farrell’s Studs Lonigan directly incorporated Chicago urban sociology as an explanatory framework. By the late 1930s, says Cappetti, Chicago sociology and literary naturalism were converging toward a common writing practice: “on the one hand the tendency toward a more subjective sociology, a sociology that rediscovered the subjectivity of the individual as a social and cultural being; on the other the tendency toward a more objective literature, a literature that rediscovered the individual’s unbreachable ties with the larger cultural and social spheres.”⁹ This literature also explored the progressive notion that societal problems can be alleviated through broad organizational changes. Wright’s Native Son (1940), for instance, concludes with Boris Max’s vision of the worldwide Communist movement working to demolish the decrepit buildings that crippled Bigger Thomas’s development. Similarly, in The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), the bookish Danny O’Neill finds respite from the environmental forces that destroy Studs and other neighborhood youth by reading Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) and envisioning “a better world, a cleaner world, a world such as that the Russians were attempting to achieve.”¹⁰

Within sociology, the backlash against this disciplinary conjunction took the form of some sociologists’ rejection of the Chicago school. In part, this rejection was regional. Eastern sociologists chafed against the midwestern dominance of their field: Chicago sociologists at this time dominated both the discipline’s major professional association (the American Sociological Society, later renamed the American Sociological Association) and its premier journal (the American Sociological Review).¹¹ However, the backlash was primarily against the Chicago school’s ostensibly unprofessional tendencies; its sociology seemed too qualitative, too amateurish, and too unscientific. These deficiencies were particularly galling because sociology seemed poised on the brink of becoming a discipline that would be centrally involved in government administration and industrial management; the reaction against the Chicago school thus roughly coincided with the rise of industrial sociology and the increased use of social scientists in the New Deal.¹² In the place of the Chicago school, Talcott Parsons gradually emerged as the discipline’s major theorist. He established his institutional base at Harvard University, where he was the leading voice within the influential Department of Social Relations, an interdisciplinary program that brought together sociologists, social psychologists, and cultural anthropologists.¹³ By the 1950s, a plurality of sociologists worked within a structural functionalist framework derived from Parsons’s second major book, The Social System (1951), and from articles written by students such as Robert Merton.¹⁴

Parsons exemplified sociologists’ desire to establish their discipline on a firmer methodological footing by purging from it the literary influences of Chicago sociology. This ambition was announced in his first book, The Structure of Social Action (1937),¹⁵ an attempt to create a grand synthesis of preexisting sociological theory through detailed readings of Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. The program announced by the book was the antithesis of everything represented by the Chicago school. The Chicago school sociologists focused on qualitative investigation, sometimes to the detriment of theory. Perhaps because of the influence of Chicago pragmatists such as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, they treated sociological concepts as tools to be picked up or discarded, depending on the tool’s utility for a given project. This pragmatic attitude toward theory can be seen in Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921),¹⁶ which was supposed to be the school’s basic theoretical text. In fact, it was a compendium of lengthy excerpts from other nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social theorists, tied together by the two editors’ introductions and conclusions to each chapter.

Parsons’s goal, in contrast, was to reemphasize the priority of general theory in sociology. For Parsons, the problem with American sociology was that it was no more than a series of discrete analyses, devoid of any theoretical framework or consistent methodology. Sociology in the hands of the Chicago school had degenerated into an unprofessional and prescientific exercise in observing and recording the social world. Parsons described his alternative methodological position as one of “analytical realism.” As opposed to the Chicago school’s qualitative empiricism, Parsons argued that theory should come first: “scientific ‘theory’—most generally defined as a body of logically interrelated ‘general concepts’ of empirical reference—is not only a dependent but an independent variable in the development of science. It goes without saying that a theory to be sound must fit the facts but it does not follow that the facts alone, discovered independently of theory, determine what the theory is to be, nor that theory is not a factor in determining what facts will be discovered, what is to be the direction of interest of scientific investigation.”¹⁷ For this reason, Parsons’s work operated at a greater level of abstraction than that of any previous sociologist; in book after book, he developed an ever more elaborate conceptual apparatus intended to categorize and systematize all possible sociological knowledge.

Even more important in terms of the effect on his discipline, Parsons reinvented the language of sociology. Most members of the Chicago school had written in a nontechnical style, enriched with lengthy quotations from subjects and evocations of Chicago neighborhoods. This style had been a virtual necessity given the Chicago sociologists’ use of participant-observation methods, and it was one of the aspects of their work that so appealed to 1930s naturalists such as Farrell and Wright. Parsons, in contrast, invented a convoluted, technical vocabulary, which many of his students referred to as “Parsonese.” It was a style intended to give the reader a sense of the abstract, technical level at which Parsons’s sociology functioned. It was distinctly unliterary, and it made few concessions to the lay reader. C. Wright Mills, in The Sociological Imagination (1959), cited the following passage from The Social System to reveal the stylistic depths to which his discipline had sunk under Parsons: “‘A role then is a sector of the total orientation system of an individual actor which is organized about expectations in relation to a particular interaction context, that is integrated with a particular set of value-standards which govern interaction with one or more alters in the appropriate complementary roles. These alters need not be a defined group of individuals, but can involve any alter if and when he comes into a particular complementary interaction relationship with ego which involves a reciprocity of expectations with reference to common standards of value-orientation.’” ¹⁸ This style privileged conceptual difficulty for its own sake, and it lent a veneer of professional and scientific dignity to a discipline struggling to defend its position in relation to the hard sciences.

However, as we have seen, if Parsons wanted to professionalize his discipline by liberating it from the literary tendencies of the Chicago school, he also wanted to claim for his discipline the moral concerns typically associated with the humanities. Beginning with The Structure of Social Action, he initiated a polemic against the positivistic–utilitarian tradition in the social sciences. This polemic prefigured Trilling’s argument against literary naturalism and progressive criticism in The Liberal Imagination; Parsons imagined culture, the world of ideas, as a distinct sphere irreducible to economic determination. Hence, the central effort of The Structure of Social Action was to show that Parsons’s four theorists—Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber—had initiated a paradigm shift in the social sciences away from economic models of social action. Society, all four theorists imagined, exists insofar as all individuals within it are guided by a “common system of value attitudes.”¹⁹ These values are fundamentally nonrational, meaning that they cannot be contained within a means–end calculus of the kind imagined by utilitarian thinkers. In Parsons’s later social systems theory or structural functionalism, which departed from his early action theory in important ways, he maintained this emphasis on the determining role of culture. At the heart of his later theory, with its description of systems within systems within systems, was the idea that every society has a central cultural system, consisting of its nonrational values and traditions. The purpose of a modern society’s social institutions (schools, hospitals, courts of law, and so on) is to integrate these values into the psyche of every individual and to recondition therapeutically anyone who goes astray. This process ensures the equilibrium or homeostasis of the social system—two of the key terms of Parsons’s critical vocabulary.

Throughout his work, Parsons combined this cultural determinism with a new-class fantasy about professionals’ function in U...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Fantasies of the New Class
• 1. The Republic of Letters: The New Criticism, Harvard Sociology, and the Idea of the University
• 2. “Life Upon the Horns of the White Man’s Dilemma”: Ralph Ellison, Gunnar Myrdal, and the Project of National Therapy
• 3. Mary McCarthy’s Field Guide to U.S. Intellectuals: Tradition and Modernization Theory in Birds of America
• 4. Saul Bellow’s Class of Explaining Creatures: Mr. Sammler’s Planet and the Rise of Neoconservatism
• 5. Experts Without Institutions: New Left Professionalism in Marge Piercy and Ursula K. Le Guin
• 6. Don DeLillo’s Academia: Revisiting the New Class in White Noise
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index