Surveyors of Customs
American Literature as Cultural Analysis
Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History;
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 7 June 2018
- ISBN 9780190876555
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages290 pages
- Size 231x152x20 mm
- Weight 408 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 Custom 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 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 say about dress-down politics and class formation in our Second Gilded Age?
In Surveyors of Customs, Joel Pfister makes the radical suggestion that for the past 250 years American writers have been doing cultural analysis. If you want to understand the workings of American capitalism as a system, Pfister suggests, you might begin with Franklin, Hawthorne, Wharton, and Wright. Making use of critical theory and close reading, Pfister brilliantly illuminates what he terms American literature's 'cultural-theoretical bite.'
Table 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
