Flexible commonplaces: The novel, social thought, and the reshaping of American middle-class ideology, 1890--1940.
详细信息
文摘
Many students of American history have seen the years 1880 to 1920 as marked by the emergence of competing conceptions of the world because industrializing society shifted power from an entrepreneurial middle class to a professionalized middle class. I argue that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a time of rhetorical exigency given the existence of new modes of thinking and that the public intellectuals of that period took advantage of this exigency to create a new consensus. Consequently, the period was characterized by more ideological harmony than is commonly supposed.;Examining the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Ellen Glasgow, Sinclair Lewis, and John Dos Passos along with the works of social thinkers W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Horton Cooley, Lester Frank Ward, and Thorstein Veblen reveals attempts to reconcile the ideology of the existing order with emerging social and economic realities. While Karl Marx posited ideological retainers for the ruling class, the work of these public intellectuals is best understood in terms of Edward Said and Noam Chomsky's arguments that ideological justification is often unintentional and intended as critique. Intellectuals attempt to “speak truth to power” in a way that is mitigated by the rhetorical means employed to ensure that the message's audience understands and agrees with the “truth” being promoted. Thus, in an operation similar to Raymond Williams's and Antonio Gramsci's descriptions of ideological production and Michel De Certeau's discussion of how storytellers modify cultural assumptions, the public intellectuals under consideration added commonplace assumptions to their descriptions of America's new social and economic realties. In these commonplaces, the voice of the old order speaks clearly, ensuring that the public intellectual did not advocate radical change but the inclusion of new information into the old ideology. This ensured that the values of the entrepreneurial nineteenth century middle class were reaffirmed for the new middle class that the professionalized twentieth century was creating and also that entrepreneurs and college-trained professionals could think of themselves as middle class. Thus, most Americans could imagine that they lived in a stable and prosperous country that provided well for its citizens.