American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s

Vincent B. Leitch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135217990
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s fully updates Vincent B. Leitch's classic book, American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s following the development of the American academy right up to the present day.

Updated throughout and with a brand new chapter, this second edition:

• provides a critical history of American literary theory and practice, discussing the impact of major schools and movements
• examines the social and cultural background to literary research, considering the role of key theories and practices
• provides profiles of major figures and influential texts, outlining the connections among theorists
• presents a new chapter on developments since the 1980s, including discussions of feminist, queer, postcolonial and ethnic criticism.

Comprehensive and engaging, this book offers a crucial overview of the development of literary studies in American universities, and a springboard to further research for all those interested in the development and study of Literature.

1
Marxist criticism in the 1930s

For the contemporary historian of literary theory and criticism in America perhaps what most distinguishes the decade of the 1930s is the formation of four significant groups: the Marxists, the New Critics, the Chicago Critics, and the New York Intellectuals. Needless to say, the histories of these schools lead backward to earlier times and forward to later years; and, too, the development of each movement links up with wider social forces and analogous groups in other places. While the emergence of heterogeneous and competing schools of criticism clearly calls for differentiated historical analyses, the field of economic, political, and intellectual forces of the 1930s serves as a common, however fragmented and complex, ground of development. The “Great Depression” nicknames the numerous socioeconomic phenomena and cultural problems that marked American history in the 1930s.

The Great Depression

During the frenetic month of the “Stock Market Crash” in October 1929 the value of stocks on the New York Exchange plummeted 37 percent. For the next dozen years America remained in a severe economic depression. At a high of 452 in September 1929, the stock average of the New York Times bottomed at 52 in July 1932. The personal income of Americans declined by more than 50 percent between 1929 and 1932. Unemployment reached roughly 25 percent in 1932 with thirteen million people out of work. Whereas wheat earned $2.16 a bushel in 1919, it sank to thirty-eight cents in 1932. For the same dates, cotton peaked at nearly forty-two cents and bottomed at about five cents per pound. Approximately one million farms were lost to mortgage holders between 1930 and 1934. Traditional agrarian modes of existence were in serious jeopardy throughout the Depression. When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as president in March 1933, four-fifths of the nation’s banks were closed: the monetary system was near ruin. In the assessment of one moderate historian: “The crash had revealed the fundamental business of the country to be unsound. Most harmful was the ability of business to maintain prices and take profits while holding down wages … with the result that about one-third of the personal income went to only 5 percent of the population.”¹

The accumulation of capital and its unbalanced distribution during the 1920s resulted from swollen profits, huge dividends, and massive tax savings to the wealthy. The consequent large money supply created an era of feverish speculation. At the same time excessive savings led to a decline in demand. What characterized the economy was, on the one hand, low wages, high prices, capital concentration and monopoly and, on the other hand, weak enforcement of antitrust regulations and widespread suspicion of collective bargaining by labor unions. In short, governmental mechanisms to balance economic inequalities were ineffective or nonexistent.

The “New Deal” of Franklin Roosevelt sought to remedy the failures of governmental policies, charting a course between the excesses of laissez-faire and socialist economics. In a sense, the New Deal of the 1930s installed a modest welfare state upon a capitalist foundation. In 1935, for example, Roosevelt fostered the now landmark Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Works Progress Administration, and the Revenue Act. The latter Act, to cite some specifics, raised surtaxes on income over $50,000, imposed graduated taxes on incomes over five million dollars (up to a 75 percent maximum rate), created an excess profits tax on corporate earnings, and established estate and gift taxes. Despite such reforms, Roosevelt himself memorably admitted in his Second Inaugural Address (1937): “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Throughout the 1930s and into World War II such conditions persisted.

Socialism and communism in America

Given the ruinous economic conditions of the Great Depression, it was not surprising that Marxist thought became a vital force during the 1930s in America. But we can go back half a century into the American past and find evidence of a growing socialist movement. In 1877 the Socialist Labor Party was formed, later came the Socialist Democratic Party in 1897, the Socialist Party of America in 1901, and the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) in 1905. American voters had a socialist option in the presidential elections of 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. In the election of 1912, for example, Eugene V. Debs received 900,000 ballots—6 percent of the popular vote. The same year thirty-three cities had socialist mayors. At the time of the 1932 election the socialist Norman Thomas gained 900,000 votes and the communist William Z. Foster got 103,000. With a million voters in the early part of the twentieth century, Marxist-inspired movements in America constituted an active, if marginal, political force.

Left wingers departed the Socialist Party in 1919 to establish the Communist and Communist Labor Parties, which were united in 1923. Until the mid-1930s, many American communists regarded socialists as dupes and fascists. In these early days the Communist Party of the United States pretty much followed the lead of Moscow. At first a secret organization, the party became legal in 1923. Until 1935 the Communist Party was a sectarian, ultraleft organization. But between 1935 and 1939, the period of the populist “People’s Front,” the party softened its approach, seeking support from liberals of many persuasions, including New Dealers. This dramatic turnabout was inspired by the Communist International. With 7,000 members at the start of the 1930s, the party attained a membership of 75,000 by 1939 and its influence in some circles often exceeded these numbers.² Among other things, the Spanish Civil War—like the later Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s— radicalized many Americans, as did the economic depression. While the United States remained neutral in this struggle, the Soviets supported the Spanish Republic against the fascists, earning the admiration of many people. Key intellectuals supported the efforts of the Communist Party during the 1930s—some as members and others as sympathizers (“fellow travelers”).

In September 1932 fifty-three artists and scholars, including, among others, Newton Arvin, Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, Sidney Hook, and Edmund Wilson, signed a letter in support of the revolutionary Communist Party and of the presidential candidacy of William Z. Foster. The League of American Writers—a Popular Front group set up in 1935—included such writers as Nelson Algren, Van Wyck Brooks, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Clifton Fadiman, James T. Farrell, Waldo Frank, Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Archibald MacLeish, Lewis Mumford, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, Nathanael West, William Carlos Williams, and Richard Wright.³ During the 1930s leftist periodicals ranged from the dogmatic Daily Worker to the doctrinaire New Masses and from the scholarly Science & Society to the literary Partisan Review.Tobe sure, a generation earlier important literary intellectuals had supported socialist programs and works: William Dean Howells, Edward Bellamy, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser, to name just five leading figures. And earlier journals welcomed socialist criticism: Comrade (started 1901), The Masses (1911), New Republic (1914), The Liberator (1918), The Nation (after liberalization in 1918), and The Modern Quarterly (1923). Despite all their internal differences, organized Marxist-inspired groups persisted in America from the late nineteenth century up until the mid-twentieth century. Artists, scholars, and intellectuals frequently participated in the various Marxist activities of the day.

While different socialist and communist cadres and parties experienced internal disputes, “red scares” brought outside threats into existence. The first significant scare came during the last days of World War I. Following the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918, many socialists landed in jail: more than a hundred Wobblies were convicted in Chicago for opposing the war and Eugene V. Debs received a twenty-year sentence for statements tending to cause resistance to the draft. (Debs was later pardoned by President Harding.) In 1919 the General Intelligence Division of the Department of Justice started to collect files on radicals. The same year 249 radicals, including Emma Goldman, were deported to Russia without the benefit of court hearings. The next year the New York Legislature expelled five duly elected socialist members. Hysteria against socialists and communists provided the essential backdrop for the judicial sentences in the infamous Sacco-Vanzetti case decided in 1921.

The second significant “red scare” spanned the years from 1947 to 1954; it was the internal counterpart of the external Cold War. In March 1947 President Truman issued an Executive Order requiring all future federal employees to sign a loyalty oath. (Over a four-year period the order affected three million people.) The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which restricted labor unions, called for labor leaders to take oaths that they were not members of the Communist Party. In 1948 Alger Hiss, a prominent citizen, was convicted in a celebrated case over lying about espionage. A more extreme fate befell Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed a few years later for espionage. The McCarron Internal Security Act of 1950 required communist or communist-front organizations to register with the U.S. Attorney General. Enforcement was put in the hands of the Subversive Activities Control Board. (The Supreme Court ruled in 1965 that this Act was in violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.) In view of the prevailing atmosphere, it was not particularly anomalous that Senator Joseph McCarthy in February 1950 should declare the State Department to be infested with communists. Though he continued to make similar charges until 1954, Senator McCarthy never uncovered any communist agents. As a result of President Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, issued in April 1953, the category “security risk” was used to screen federal employees, who could lose their jobs because of dubious associations or personal habits. In December of that year the Atomic Energy Commission removed the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, because he had associated with communists in the past and had expressed doubt in the late 1940s about the hydrogen bomb. The “red scares” after each world war were not temporary: a line of continuity exists between 1917 and 1954. The House of Representatives established in 1938 the notorious Committee on Un-American Activities, which sought to harass communists, as did the Smith Act of 1940.

While “red scares” gradually weakened popular support for Marxist movements, finally putting the Communist Party out of action in the mid-1950s, it was the Hitler–Stalin Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 that most dramatically damaged left-wing politics. The specter of a jingoistic deal between fascists and communists undermined the widespread support for and the prestige of leftist parties and policies. The infamous Stalinist treason trials of 1936–38 also severely diminished the promise and possibilities of Marxist politics. To summarize, a history of Marxist activity and organization spanning two generations came to a virtual halt in the postwar period, having reached a peak of intensity in the 1930s. Ironically, the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s cared little about this American history, sometimes turning for inspiration and guidance toward European Marxist theories and thinkers.⁴ If there was an American lost generation, it was perhaps that group of Marxist literary intellectuals active during the period of the Great Depression and living on into the era of the Vietnam War.

Marxist philosophy and aesthetics

The tenets of orthodox Marxist philosophy insist on (1) the indissoluble priority of matter over mind (materialism); (2) the economic foundations of social actions and institutions (economic determinism); (3) the continuous struggle of social groups as the motor force of history (theory of class struggle); (4) the production of social value through work (labor theory of value); (5) the capitalistic “commodification” of relations and resultant alienation (reification); (6) the inevitable seizure of power by the working class (theory of proletarian revolution); and (7) the ultimate establishment of a classless society (communist utopia). That the socioeconomic conditions of existence determine human consciousness, and not vice versa, is central to classical Marxist thought, as is the view that the economic relations of production (the economic base or infrastructure) determine the ideological formations of society (the cultural superstructure). In Marxist thinking, ideology designates the political, legal, religious, philosophical, educational, and aesthetic forms that consciousness assumes at a given stage of economic/material development. Finally, the theory of the successive “historical modes of production” (the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, the bourgeois, and the socialist), however schematic, is fundamental to much of Marxist philosophy.

Because the comments of Marx and Engels on specifically aesthetic matters are scant, fragmentary, and unorganized, a “Marxist aesthetics” must be (re) constructed.⁵ While unified doctrine in aesthetics is not to be found in Marxist philosophy, certain traditional lines of thought give direction and coherence to this field of inquiry. In their occasional writings on art and literature, Marx and Engels provide three very different perspectives: (1) art depends on a particular social formation; (2) art is (and should be) an instrument of political action; and (3) art is relatively autonomous. The first major theoretician of the initial perspective is Plekhanov, who promulgates systematically the view that art reflects life. The second perspective is developed early and effectively by Lenin and institutionalized later by Zhadanov: art must seek to further the socialist revolution. From this program emerge such phenomena as Proletkult, Agit-Prop Theater, and Socialist Realism. The third perspective finds support in early Trotsky, who, despite much hedging in Literature and Revolution (1924), allows creative art to unfold in a sphere of its own.

In early twentieth-century Marxist aesthetics four modes of analysis predominate. The first type undertakes historical and theoretical inquiry into the general status of art and literature in human societies. This resembles traditional aesthetics. The second kind attempts to specify the role of art and literature in society, particularly its political function. This mode usually promotes activist revolutionary programs. The third analytic examines past artworks and literary texts, especially masterpieces, to disclose their ideological configurations—to uncover the relationships between cultural productions and socioeconomic foundations. Such “ideological analysis” or ideology critique of great works parallels mainline historical scholarship. The fourth type engages in demystification of contemporary works to make visible their ideological leanings in relation to existing conditions. This kind of work begets much partisan literary journalism.⁶

The leading American literary Marxists of the 1930s most often practiced historical scholarship and especially literary journalism. Their purely aesthetic theories and their revolutionary programs were borrowed almost wholesale from earlier Marxist sources. The object of much native Marxist scholarship was the American “social totality” (the historical configuration of base and superstructure in a given time), usually of the period stretching from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Leading critics like V. F. Calverton and Granville Hicks, in their major historical projects, examined primarily ideology— the ideas, values, and sentiments expressed by writers in their particular milieus. Understanding the material conditions and ideological formations of the American past provided such critics a certain comprehension of the present and a vision of the future. In other words, ideology critique furthered programs for revolutionary activity—as we shall see.

In Marxist aesthetic theory, there exist several long-standing areas of debate. The exact relation between art and ideology is a case in point. Art is part of the superstructure, the ideological framework, of social existence. Yet art not only embodies but also transforms ideology; it reflects and (re)produces ideology and it deflects and revalues ideology. This relation of intimacy and distance between art and ideology is, in Marxist terms, “dialectical.” The pattern of reciprocal interaction here repeats itself in the vexing relation of aesthetic form and content: each shapes the other, both are ideological and transformative. Another significant Marxist area of dispute concerns the role of the artist in relation to his work. The notorious Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism, developed by Lenin in 1905 and later promulgated by Zhadanov as dogma in 1934, insists that writers should be self-consciously progressive and partisan in their work. But the classical Marxist “principle of contradiction” allows that the political views of an artist may (and often do) run counter to what the artwork may objectively show. Accordingly, a work of art can serve progressive ends in spite of the artist’s intentions. A final area of debate involves the Marxist law of “unequal developme...