[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Suffice to say here that the openness of the form in regard to racial formation allowed for its later and productive use within Popular Front definitions of the people.In the nineteenth century, realism was not yoked to a single political project.It was touted by some advocates as a language of social critique and by others as an establishment form; among elite Boston philanthropists it could be both at the same time (Glazener 28-33).Marx and Engels left a significant precedent for receiving realism as an oppositional mode by hailing it as the best artistic genre for revealing the totality of capitalist social relations, and their enthusiasm for its class politics would carry to the other side of the Atlantic.Howells valued the genre precisely for its “communistic taste,” and he later took the highly unpopular stance of defending the Haymarket anarchists (8).Yet even when it sought to oppose the interests of the establishment, nineteenth-century realism inIntroductionxxxviipractice was hamstrung as a democratic project.Despite his call for accessibility and his ambivalence toward the figure of the artist, Howells’s narrative voice in his fiction—as was the case with many nineteenth-century realists—retained a Victorian density that dramatically separated it from the vernacular expressions of the characters it described.Indeed, realism’s highly educated advocates often represented it within the Atlantic-group magazines as a form about the people but not for the people, as something “too good” for the average reader (Glazener 48).Granville Hicks, a key literary critic of the communist left in the 1930s, faulted Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane,and even Jack London as insufficiently realist because the politics of their work lacked a fundamental connection to the popular social movements of their day(44–45, 93, 193).Following Antonio Gramsci, nineteenth-century realism wasnot generally a “national-popular” literature, because the “feelings of the people[were] not lived by the writers as their own” (365).And despite its embrace by Marx, the nineteenth century left did not whole-heartedly embrace the creation of new realist work accessible to the masses.Nineteenth-century socialists by and large stressed a mastery of the classics, not a new proletarian culture (Denning, Three Worlds 56).In January 1896, for example, the major socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason listed almost no fiction in the column “Books Workers Should Read,” and featured advertisements for“Penny Classics” as late as 1909.21 The impulse to create a realist, proletarian culture gained ground after the Bolshevik Revolution, when creating a new society was much more tangible to those on the left.By the late 1920s, the communist journal the New Masses hosted its own cultural critics to evaluate the flood of original, aesthetic production from oppositional writers and artists.The self-proclaimed realists of the 1930s lessened the distance between author and audience, coming much closer to the accessibility Howells sometimes championed,and to the unity of popular and intellectual cultures which Gramsci referredto as “the national popular.” The realist rejection of the cultural producer as a “special” figure, as well a more consistent use of simpler prose after the late nineteenth century, would help lessen the gulf between artists and audiences, facilitating the rise of realism as a true “people’s” form.22Resurrecting the Body and Soul of the People’s CenturyIf Sullivan’s Travels stands as a clear lampoon of “We’re the people,” its implicit silencing of “The People’s Century” is emblematic of the place of the moreracially inclusive Popular Front pluralism in the historical memory of the U.S.xxxviiiIntroductiondominant culture.On the most basic level, Sturges severs antiracism from the 1930s left by withholding any discernable racial politics from his character Sullivan.But as I have noted, Sullivan is also drawn from another Hollywood leftist—John Garfield—who is not explicitly referenced anywhere in the film.Garfield was an avid participant in the People’s Century.As I will discuss in chapter 2, he went on to produce the film Body and Soul in 1947, a boxing story that wedded a moral rejection of acquisitive individualism to a critique of whiteness.Sullivan’s Travels, by contrast, participates in the very racialization fought by those, like Garfield, who tried to make the People’s Century a reality.It uses its one reappearing African American character—billed as “Colored Chef ”—forminstrel humor, and the climactic scene, where a largely white band of pris-oners file into a church while the black parishioners sing “Go Down, Moses,”ultimately trivializes the history of African American vernacular culture [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Suffice to say here that the openness of the form in regard to racial formation allowed for its later and productive use within Popular Front definitions of the people.In the nineteenth century, realism was not yoked to a single political project.It was touted by some advocates as a language of social critique and by others as an establishment form; among elite Boston philanthropists it could be both at the same time (Glazener 28-33).Marx and Engels left a significant precedent for receiving realism as an oppositional mode by hailing it as the best artistic genre for revealing the totality of capitalist social relations, and their enthusiasm for its class politics would carry to the other side of the Atlantic.Howells valued the genre precisely for its “communistic taste,” and he later took the highly unpopular stance of defending the Haymarket anarchists (8).Yet even when it sought to oppose the interests of the establishment, nineteenth-century realism inIntroductionxxxviipractice was hamstrung as a democratic project.Despite his call for accessibility and his ambivalence toward the figure of the artist, Howells’s narrative voice in his fiction—as was the case with many nineteenth-century realists—retained a Victorian density that dramatically separated it from the vernacular expressions of the characters it described.Indeed, realism’s highly educated advocates often represented it within the Atlantic-group magazines as a form about the people but not for the people, as something “too good” for the average reader (Glazener 48).Granville Hicks, a key literary critic of the communist left in the 1930s, faulted Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane,and even Jack London as insufficiently realist because the politics of their work lacked a fundamental connection to the popular social movements of their day(44–45, 93, 193).Following Antonio Gramsci, nineteenth-century realism wasnot generally a “national-popular” literature, because the “feelings of the people[were] not lived by the writers as their own” (365).And despite its embrace by Marx, the nineteenth century left did not whole-heartedly embrace the creation of new realist work accessible to the masses.Nineteenth-century socialists by and large stressed a mastery of the classics, not a new proletarian culture (Denning, Three Worlds 56).In January 1896, for example, the major socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason listed almost no fiction in the column “Books Workers Should Read,” and featured advertisements for“Penny Classics” as late as 1909.21 The impulse to create a realist, proletarian culture gained ground after the Bolshevik Revolution, when creating a new society was much more tangible to those on the left.By the late 1920s, the communist journal the New Masses hosted its own cultural critics to evaluate the flood of original, aesthetic production from oppositional writers and artists.The self-proclaimed realists of the 1930s lessened the distance between author and audience, coming much closer to the accessibility Howells sometimes championed,and to the unity of popular and intellectual cultures which Gramsci referredto as “the national popular.” The realist rejection of the cultural producer as a “special” figure, as well a more consistent use of simpler prose after the late nineteenth century, would help lessen the gulf between artists and audiences, facilitating the rise of realism as a true “people’s” form.22Resurrecting the Body and Soul of the People’s CenturyIf Sullivan’s Travels stands as a clear lampoon of “We’re the people,” its implicit silencing of “The People’s Century” is emblematic of the place of the moreracially inclusive Popular Front pluralism in the historical memory of the U.S.xxxviiiIntroductiondominant culture.On the most basic level, Sturges severs antiracism from the 1930s left by withholding any discernable racial politics from his character Sullivan.But as I have noted, Sullivan is also drawn from another Hollywood leftist—John Garfield—who is not explicitly referenced anywhere in the film.Garfield was an avid participant in the People’s Century.As I will discuss in chapter 2, he went on to produce the film Body and Soul in 1947, a boxing story that wedded a moral rejection of acquisitive individualism to a critique of whiteness.Sullivan’s Travels, by contrast, participates in the very racialization fought by those, like Garfield, who tried to make the People’s Century a reality.It uses its one reappearing African American character—billed as “Colored Chef ”—forminstrel humor, and the climactic scene, where a largely white band of pris-oners file into a church while the black parishioners sing “Go Down, Moses,”ultimately trivializes the history of African American vernacular culture [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]