Surveyors of Custom
American Literature as Cultural Analysis
Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History;
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 11 February 2016
- ISBN 9780190276157
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages288 pages
- Size 236x160x25 mm
- Weight 499 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 1 halftone 0
Categories
Short description:
Surveyors of Customs explores literature's insights into how America--its soft capitalism, its "democratized" inequality, its Americanization of power--"ticks." Joel Pfister argues that writers from Benjamin Franklin to Louise Erdrich can be read as critical "surveyors" of customs, culture, hegemony, capitalism's emotional logic, and much else.
MoreLong description:
In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, fired from Salem's Customs House and returning to writing, reconceived his old job title, Surveyor of Customs, as his new one. Taking seriously this naming of the American author's project, Joel Pfister argues that writers from Benjamin Franklin to Louise Erdrich can be read as critical "surveyors" of customs, culture, hegemony, capitalism's emotional logic, and much else. Literary surveyors have helped make possible---and, if we credit its critical work, can advance what we now call cultural analysis. In recent decades cultural theory and history have changed how we read literature. Literature can return the favor. America's achievement as a literary nation has contributed creatively to its accomplishment as a self-critical nation. The surveyors convened herein wrote novels, stories, plays, poetry, essays, autobiography, journals, and cultural criticism. Surveyors of Customs explores literature's insights into how America-its soft capitalism, its "democratized" inequality, its Americanization of power-"ticks." Historical-and timely--questions abound. When and why did capitalism invest in the secular "soul-making" business and what roles did literature play in this? What does literature teach us about its relationship to the establishment of a personnel culture that moved beyond self-help incentive-making and intensified Americans' preoccupations with personal life to turn them into personnel? How did literature contribute to the reproduction of "classless" class relations--and what does this tell us about dress-down politics and class formation in our Second Gilded Age?
MoreTable of Contents:
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Critical Work and Critical Pleasure of American Literature
1. Inner-Self Industries: Soft Capitalism's Reproductive Logic
2. How America Works: Getting Personal to Get Personnel
3. Dress-Down Conquest: Americanizing Top-Down as Bottom-Up
Afterword: Payoffs
Notes
Works Consulted
Index
