Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction (New Americanists) - Hardcover

Seguin, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822326752 ISBN 13: 9780822326755

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Virtually since its inception, the United States has nurtured a dreamlike and often delirious image of itself as an essentially classless society. Given the stark levels of social inequality that have actually existed and that continue today, what sustains this at once hopelessly ideological and breathlessly utopian mirage? In Around Quitting Time Robert Seguin investigates this question, focusing on a series of modern writers who were acutely sensitive to the American web of ideology and utopic vision in order to argue that a pervasive middle-class imaginary is the key to the enigma of class in America.
Tracing connections between the reconstruction of the labor process and the aesthetic dilemmas of modernism, between the emergence of the modern state and the structure of narrative, Seguin analyzes the work of Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, John Barth, and others. These fictional narratives serve to demonstrate for Seguin the pattern of social sites and cultural phenomenon that have emerged where work and leisure, production and consumption, and activity and passivity coincide. He reveals how, by creating pathways between these seemingly opposed domains, the middle-class imaginary at once captures and suspends the dynamics of social class and opens out onto a political and cultural terrain where class is both omnipresent and invisible.
Aroung Quitting Time will interest critics and historians of modern U.S. culture, literary scholars, and those who explore the interaction between economic and cultural forms.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Seguin is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York at Brockport.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"A remarkably positive achievement that contributes significantly to an understanding of quite a range of texts, to an understanding of specific currents of literary modernism, and most generally to an understanding of class, which--in a U.S. context especially--remains that most vexed of social categories."--Evan Watkins, Pennsylvania State University

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Around Quitting Time - CL

By Robert Seguin

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Robert Seguin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822326755

Chapter One

Class, Middle Class, and the Modalities of Labor There is no permanent class of hired laborers among us.... If any should continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune. -Abraham Lincoln

"Is there 'class' in America?" asks Thomas Geoghegan in his alternately wry and despairing memoir of being a labor lawyer in Chicago during the Reagan years. "To me, it's such a stupid question, a hopeless question. Unfortunately, I'm obsessed with it." Geoghegan describes an unremittingly hostile environment both for workers and for his own efforts to represent them: capital was in flight, the steelworkers' and the air traffic controllers' unions had been crippled or smashed outright, and the egregious Taft-Hartley Act, a Cold War monstrosity that had lain dormant during the "labor peace" of the preceding two decades, was discovering whole new domains of application. Efforts to generate working-class cohesion were rendered virtually impossible, most often because they were simply illegal. Geoghegan nonetheless finds himself at once moved and puzzled by the sudden, fragile, yet vital forms of solidarity he sporadically encounters among the groups of workers he represents, forms which often evaporate as quickly as they had arisen, vanishing, he imagines, into a kind of suburban black hole: "If I go to the Hancock, up to the 95th floor, I can look west over the city and see streetlights, in straight lines, blasting out into the suburbs, out to where the rank and file live.... Looking out from up here, I think maybe [history] is over. Looking at the lines, perfectly straight, I think of all the people out there watching TV." His lofty vantage point also figuratively encodes his own consciously acknowledged position of relative affluence and self-professed yuppie tastes, marking him in a certain sense as "outside" the very mystery of class he claims enthralls him.

Geoghegan's evocation of the long lines of streetlights heading out into the Chicago suburbs ineluctably recalls Dreiser's remarkable description early in Sister Carrie of the lines of streetlamps swaying in the wind, surrounded only by empty prairie. At this earlier moment, neither television nor even the suburb itself had yet arrived. Both scenes participate, however (by way, as we shall see, of a certain updating or refunctioning of an older pastoral discourse), in a similar production of what I call an essentially middle-class space. In this space-which is ideological, but also material, physical-class itself and the exigencies and investments attendant upon it are, I argue, at once produced but then occluded and rearticulated, to the point where the term "middle class" itself in effect becomes synonymous with "classlessness," an ideologico-practical inhabitance of the world wherein class has been putatively superseded, or at least temporarily suspended. This is a condition or feeling tone of daily life-whose latest systemic mutation would appear to be the sheer voluntarism of the field of "class as lifestyle," suggestively analyzed by Evan Watkins-that can afford people whose own economic status is tenuous at best, who have been used and abused by capital in a host of different ways, the opportunity to consider themselves middle class (and, from the opposite direction, so can wealthy stockbrokers). "Middle class" is then my partial, necessary but not sufficient, answer to the conundrum of class in America-where is it? why is it stubborn and fleeting at the same time?-that Geoghegan invokes.

This is, in one sense, a very familiar territory. The United States has, since the time of the Puritans, been variously conceived of as a providentially blessed nation that has escaped the burdens of history and social division, whose citizens enjoy a birthright of Lockean liberalism and, as implied above by Lincoln, readily achievable upward mobility. This is a set of discourses generally gathered under the rubric of "exceptionalism," great swaths of which continue to litter bookshelves and the brains of media pundits across the country. Exceptionalist discourse has, as Eli Zaretsky argues, "functioned throughout the nation's history to deny and absorb class conflict," and it constitutes an integral part of that ideological cluster recently addressed by Benjamin DeMott as the "American myth of classlessness," in his symptomatically titled book The Imperial Middle. Other ingredients of the myth include notions of limitless personal freedom, an indomitable self which is at once fluid enough to assume a wide range of roles, and the centrality of individual action and the fulfillment of desire. Some of this is quite pertinent in the narrative analyses that follow, for it turns out that many of the novelistic moments we will engage involve precisely the severe problematization of the self and of desire. That is, at the same time that these novels articulate some of the dynamics involved in the elaboration of what Loren Baritz terms the "subjective middle class," they work in different ways toward a (frequently fitful and uncertain) critique of this state.

In general, however, discussions of the forms of exceptionalism tend to be hampered by remaining at the level of ideas and ideologies, where the hegemonic power of the middle class and the commensurate weakness of working-class institutions and ideologies are explained in terms of Locke's greatness or the persistence of conservative strains of Christianity. Political (and religious) ideas and ideologies tend to be rooted in, and take as their presuppositions, the lofty and mystified realm of what Marx described as "political community," wherein man exists as "an imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty ... infused with an unreal universality." My sense is, rather, that American novelists and their narratives have inhabited and drawn their vitality from the more profane sphere that Marx counterposes to political community, the sphere of crude economic competition and viscous daily life, namely that of civil society, in which man "acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers." What therefore in part distinguishes my approach here is my effort to elaborate some of the material underpinnings subtending and informing what might be called the "semantic complex" of the middle class, the combined histories of narrative and socioeconomic change that converge in its emergence. I explore the middle class not so much as thing or idea, but more as a social-semantic structure capable of a range of investments, and supporting a range of practices and beliefs. The familiar and unassuming phrase "middle class" conceals an almost totemic or talismanic power, and beneath it lies a complex, multivalent, and sedimented history, a history to which certain modern American narratives afford us vital access. In addition, by framing the matter in strong terms, not as some mere weakening of class structure or...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822326752
• ISBN 13: 9780822326755
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar