English

By reassessing Dreiser’s novel of female development as stemming from the
traditional masculinist models of Bildungsroman, this article puts pressure on the gendered dialectic between pleasure and labour in the evolving mode of
production that undergirds the traditional Bildungsroman form. Dreiser produces a Bildungsroman that reconfigures the sexual logic of the genre’s relationship to Eros—the human drive to reproduce—into a sensuous depiction of monopoly capitalism’s reproduction itself, in conspicuous consumption and mass culture.

Dreiser does so at a time when the Modernists turned to the figure of arrested
development to reflect the seismic shift in thinking about subjective formation
and its reflection of national time. It is in no way incidental that Dreiser selects a female protagonist for his task; Carrie’s apprenticeship boils down to a dialectical interplay between alienated labour and the sensuous romance of capital as a substitution for the courtship plot. Dreiser uses the homology of the unanchored female protagonist, and what her position reveals to us about the new urban American fabric, to problematise the possibility for realist literary representation to accurately bear witness to modernisation. Realism, perforce, succumbs to Romance as Carrie becomes upwardly mobile in the division of labour; but the knife of this negative dialectic cuts deep and both ways, resulting in a searing critique of America’s reproductive centres.

Themes of fear and loathing are often associated with the narrative trajectory of the twentieth century  American  Bildungsroman. In the traditional European prototype,  coming-of-age is charted through the representation of ordeals and life lessons which the young protagonist or Bildungsheld must overcome in order to achieve their harmonious course of maturation. The American model forgoes this necessity of harmony. Ralph Ellison’s 'Invisible  Man' (1952) is one such coming-of-age narrative, following the pedagogical and experiential education of an African  American  adolescent  in  the  1920s  and  30s.  By  innovating  upon  several  of  the traditional  Bildungsroman  subgenres:  the  Künstlerroman  (development  of  the  artist  novel), and Erziehungsroman (novel of pedagogical e
ducation),  Ellison subverts  the inefficiencies of representing race in American literature and culture that had  come before  him. At the same time, the author illuminates the hypocrisies of racial and ideological identity politics in a segregated society.

In 'E. L. Doctorow: A Reconsideration', eds. M Wutz and J Murphet (University of Edinburgh Press, 2019).

In Doctorow's early Bildungsromane, including 'Daniel' and 'Loon Lake' (1980), the fulfillment of that genre - aesthetic self-cultivation - is ruptured through a repetitious, pendulous narratology that ultimately distorts the bourgeois absolutism, harmony, and totality of the generic antecedent. Those radical formal tendencies chafe against the author’s more customary adherence to the genre in his late Bildungsromane, such as World’s Fair (1985) or Billy Bathgate (1989). 'The Book of Daniel' presents a failed initiation or formation of the subject as such; but more importantly it presents a clear case of the failure for the form itself (a novel which simulates Daniel’s university dissertation) to cathartically accommodate the genre’s aesthetic representation of the self-formation of the self.

How do we make sense of this legacy of contradiction: that Doctorow's works seem to both reject and internalize Westernized bourgeois individualistic ideology exemplified in the ‘history of the young man’ genre? This chapter takes Theodor Adorno's essay "Theory of Halbbildung" as a point of theoretical departure, to consider how might we ratify such radical tendencies as are displayed in 'The Book of Daniel' against the increasingly empirical trajectory of Doctorow’s fixation with corrupted young manhood. In that essay, Adorno outlines how the state of pseudo-education (Halbbildung) resulting from the relapse of enlightenment culture into barbarism in the twentieth century has displaced genuine Bildung. The ideal of Bildung depends upon the realisation of rational autonomy, guided by both the personal and cultural maturation of an individual; however, if the culture itself fails to realise its ennobling function in this process, if that culture succumbs to irrationality, the possibility for genuine individuation disintegrates. By this logic, the Bildungsroman, that novel form which tasks itself with reflecting Bildung, must in turn reflect the failure of Bildung if those preconditions for its realisation are no longer possible. As in the case of 'The Book of Daniel,' that formal disappointment abides by Adorno's logic theory. Yet his later texts which more obviously follow the laws of the Bildungsromane genre, do abide by the author's unwavering commitment to rejecting capitalist  ideologies of self-centered individualism and pseudo-education. In both cases, this critique is launched through the very genre that must, by definition, internalize those values.

The extensive ‘secretarial’ labour that Gretel Karplus Adorno performed for the Frankfurt School is often overlooked in critical accounts. This article examines the Adornos’ division of textual labour, and Karplus’ ‘vulture-like’ stenography, distinguishing it from the dominant modernist views of secretarial labour, such as T. S. Eliot’s automaton typist, and Henry James’s typist-as-medium.The Adornos’ stenographical method hinges upon a dialectical division of labour, which can be read through Theodor Adorno’s aphorism‘Sacrificial Lamb’. Adorno’s writer elides the‘risk of formulation’ necessary to commit to unformed ideas, by engaging his‘troublesome helper’ typist in a dialectical struggle over textual authority. Whilst the dictator dominates his aide, the text still bears the imprint of its invisible contributor. Indeed, as Karplus shoulders Adorno’s own divested‘risk of formulation ’after they wed in 1937, he develops his critique of the capitalist mode of production, which lures women to the workforce under the promise of emancipation, and instead exploits and devalorizes their  mental  and  physical  labour.  Simultaneously,  Adorno cultivates  a  philosophical  style  that  supports  his  modernist aesthetics, characterised by fragmentation, parataxis, and verbal improvisation, abetted by Karplus and their mutual investment in the risks of writing.

This article treats Carson McCullers' often overlooked novel, 'The Member of the Wedding,' to a consideration of its métis characterization. I consider the ways that this novel's internal structure of feeling liquefies the plantation logic still lodged at the core of the Southern mid-twentieth century household. Whilst métissage commonly refers to crossings of race, the métis also serves as a pliable, cross-cultural categorical supplement, that further accounts for McCullers' many other "freakish" intermixtures, particularly gender partitions in the household structure.

Despite McCullers' well-rehearsed preoccupations with the domestic Bildungsroman's routine inquiries into subjectivity, alienation, and belonging, the political scale of her vision for the Southern household is much larger than its setting suggests; it "contradicts" itself, and like Whitman's democratic "I," Frankie's "we of me" contains multitudes. McCullers' métis characterization challenges the veneer of Southern unity whilst its households remain guided by the authority of atavistic plantation logic; in this disentanglement, McCullers fashions a literary receptacle for the composite multiplicity of Southern character to undergo redevelopment.

The presence of music in Carson McCullers’ works has been well documented, given that her fiction is crowded with classical composers, such as Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Wagner and Mahler, as well as jazz and spiritual mainstays that provide richly suggestive soundtracks to her works. In addition to considerations of her consciously “fugal” form (M. C. Smith; Fuller), McCullers’ short fiction, including “Court in the West Eighties,” has been accessed through the structural configuration of the string quartet (Magome). However, as a one-time lecturer who used a gramophone to teach the theory of chamber music (Carr 71), McCullers frequently updates the technical conditions of music in her writing. The ‘power’ of musical suggestiveness in her fiction is not only determined by the perennial fashions of music that were influential to the modernist short story, such as jazz or atonality, or the late Romantics. McCullers’ fiction also harnesses music’s materialist context: its technological reproduction through radio, gramophony, and cinema. As literature seeks to tap the powers of the musical ideal to “Make it new!” as Ezra Pound proclaimed, the modernist aesthetic does so by wiring musical “bodies into circuits with all manner of machines” (Goble, 'Beautiful Circuits,' 12), from radios and phonographs, to cinematic sound-tracking.

This chapter illustrates how in content, McCullers’ stories acknowledge the way in which ‘new media’ threaten to displace literature and classical music as the cultural struts of twentieth century subjectivity, as the culture industry subsumes all art production. Yet stylistically, she also learns to amplify affect in her explorations of subjectivity by exposing music’s mediatic unconscious – where the experience of classical music is increasingly rerouted through new media, even within the unconscious. McCullers thus finds new means to articulate the inner dynamics of 1930s life in those mergers between prose, music, and technology.

As Nathan Waddell (2019) has recently argued of the literary modernists whose aesthetic incorporation of the Beethovenian legend complicates the dominant view of modernism as an anti-traditionalist enterprise, Beethoven’s music has in fact left a more significant and complicated mark on African American literature relating to the sublime properties of his musical aesthetic than has previously been recognized. As a point of departure, I apply Michael Shapiro's definition of the racial sublime as a
confrontation with the “still vast oppressive structure that imperils black lives” to the setting of twentieth century African American Literature argue that use of musical description and ekphrasis – in which Beethoven’s Romantic sublime stands in for the racial sublime.
This transference, I argue, is not an expression of the artist’s repressed instinctual conflict, the mere sublimation of their devotion to ‘white’ culture and the cult of genius, as Amiri Baraka once suggested. Rather, Beethoven’s music formed a persistent and powerful political allegory of the racial sublime for many prominent twentieth century authors in their literary works, where the sublime constitutes a sublimation of direct
forms of power into a range of aesthetic experiences. This can be observed in the Beethovenian ekphrasis and description featured in prose works by James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison – four writers whose works have also been considered indebted to blues and jazz musical influences, and who approach the racial sublime not through language, but by appealing to music’s non-signifying suggestiveness, in order to capture the intensities that radiate out of these encounters.
As this article reveals, their allegorical uses for Beethoven are not unitary. The forcefield of the racial sublime is registered allegorically through the performative sublime of “Sonata Pathétique” in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); the sublime melancholy of the “Moonlight Sonata,” in Hughes’ tragic short story, “Home” (1934); the spiritual sublime of Beethoven’s piano concerti and the Ninth
Symphony in Baldwin’s short story, “Previous Condition” (1948); and the heroic sublime of the Fifth Symphony in Ellison’s Bildungsroman, Invisible Man (1951).

This chapter discusses the relationship between classical music and regional identity in literature about the U.S. South in the nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth century. It features a spotlight on classical music and the South in James Weldon Johnson's "Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man."

This chapter discusses classical musical reproduction in the literary texts, with a particular focus on modern and modernist literature and the reproduction of musical scores in literary works by authors including Hope Mirrlees, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Georgia Douglas Johnson.

The typewriter—the machine and the human operator at the nadir of the white-collar hierarchy—became associated with white female workers in the American racial imaginary. Although the color line deterred Black applicants from that side of the collar line, the Black typewriter as a literary type came to salience between 1886 and 1930, disrupting what I call the “bureaucratization of the racial imaginary”: the process whereby the exclusionary white middle-class tenets underpinning the bureaucratized office both regulated and were also informed by the imaginative possibilities of race, gender, and labor. Tracing the Black typewriter from Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and Charles W. Chesnutt to Jean Toomer and Dorothy West, I reveal how these authors construed white-collar identity as a form of racial passing, requiring the worker’s acceptance of racial and sexual segregation. Their innovative narratives about passing as white collar foregrounded the Black typewriter’s unsettling experiences inside that system, challenging the theory that economic uplift would inherently promote racial and sexual equality.

Why did the Bildungsroman, defined as the novel of development, and its protagonist Youth, become the symbolic form of the U.S.’s cultural preoccupation with regional difference amidst the nation’s rapid but uneven development c.1900–1960? As a genre that historically represented the young individual’s development in national-historical time, the Bildungsroman became one crucial means of configuring the culturally, politically, and economically asymmetrical effects of national modernization and the U.S.’s political ascendence within the capitalist world-system. Responding to that predicament, the novel of uneven development rose to salience, led by its protagonist, the unfixed youth, whose development within the national-historical time of Americanization is unsettled by their preoccupation with regional difference: an immobilizing entanglement I call American literature’s regional complex. This book maps four prominent variations across the Midwest, Northeast, South, and Southwest that responded to that uneven development, fragmenting, and ultimately denying the Bildungsroman’s consolidation into a coherent nationalist form.

In what follows, I trace that author-typewriter nexus¾by which I mean fictionalized
encounters between typewriters and authors¾in Thurman’s self-referential novels, "The
Blacker the Berry" and "Infants of the Spring," which are two illustrative cases of the evolving cultural logic of New Negro authorship and masculinity in the 1920s. Although in both novels, an author is anxious to differentiate themselves from the tradesperson the typewriter represents, Thurman disrupted and queered the expected heterosexual terms of their engagement. Rather than assume a straightforward opposite to the author, then, Thurman’s typewriter served as a nuanced symbol of authorial anxiety: the creative response to the complex concerns, pressures, and risks commercial professionalization posed to the New Negro movement. Blending reality and realism, Thurman’s novels assembled common myths regarding sexual identities and professional types, including authorship, in order to disrupt them; whilst subsequently reorganizing hegemonic reductive masculine stereotypes that were associated with male genius and authorship. I read these novels' statements on the racial and sexual cultural logic of typewriting in the context of Thurman's marriage to and working relationship with the typist, Louise Thompson, his editorship at Macauley's, and within the wider dynamics of textual production during the Harlem Renaissance.