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The Potemkin Village Dilemma

Michael David-Fox

in Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941

This chapter provides an archivally based account of the “sites of communism” or Soviet model institutions and the methods used to display them to foreign visitors in the USSR in the interwar period. ... More

This chapter provides an archivally based account of the “sites of communism” or Soviet model institutions and the methods used to display them to foreign visitors in the USSR in the interwar period. Although a resurgence of rumors about “Potemkin villages” was widespread starting in the 1920s, these model sites were more than façades set up for foreign eyes: they played a major role for domestic audiences and became an important feature of Stalinist culture. The chapter provides an in-depth exploration of the methods of “cultural show” (kul'tpokaz)—the methods of teaching foreigners to see the kernel of the bright future in the present and blame problems on the legacies of the past. Watershed moments in the development of these methods were the 1927 Congress of Friends that brought one thousand delegates to Moscow and the remarkable 1927–28 Soviet tour of the American writer Theodore Dreiser.Less

A World Full of Fists

David E. Shi

in Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920

Literary naturalists unearthed sobering new facts about contemporary American life. By exposing the comfortable to the reality of violent households and repulsive persons, they reminded readers that ... More

Literary naturalists unearthed sobering new facts about contemporary American life. By exposing the comfortable to the reality of violent households and repulsive persons, they reminded readers that the supposed moral benefits of poverty may come at the expense of humanity itself. Perhaps most important, the naturalists questioned the very notion of the autonomous self capable of moral judgment and independent action. What most sharply differentiated Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane from William Dean Howells, Henry James Jr., Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton was their recognition of the overwhelming power of economic forces and nonrational impulses. To one degree or another, the naturalists imposed upon the world of observed fact an austere assumption about the deterministic nature of existence. This led them to go beyond a realism of simple facts, literal objects, and evident moral choices.Less

Theodore Dreiser on Monogamy, Varietism, and “This Matter of Marriage, Now”

Clare Virginia Eby

in Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era

Theodore Dreiser’s portrayal of marriage in The “Genius” (1915), inspired by his marriage to Sara White, is both scabrous and infamous. An anti-vice campaign to suppress the novel inspired a ... More

Theodore Dreiser’s portrayal of marriage in The “Genius” (1915), inspired by his marriage to Sara White, is both scabrous and infamous. An anti-vice campaign to suppress the novel inspired a counter-campaign to defend it on grounds of free speech. This battle consolidated Dreiser’s reputation as a rebel, but it also obscured his earlier, more moderate positions on marriage. Those more optimistic views emerge in Dreiser’s courtship letters to Sara, correspondence with his lover Kirah Markham, and accounts of the Dreiser marriage by friends. They appear most notably in the 1911 version of The “Genius”, in which Dreiser charts a path toward the redemption of marriage and endorses progressive reform goals. Dreiser revised the novel in 1915 to denounce marriage, thus aligning himself with Greenwich Village bohemianism. Consequently, he established an enduring public image as a cosmopolitan rebel and Don Juan. But this shift resulted from his decision to shed the progressive ideal of voluntary monogamy (as in the earlier version of the novel) and embrace the sexual varietism advocated by Emma Goldman (which holds sway in the published version). Dreiser’s twice-told tale captures the transitional nature of Progressive era marital reform, illustrating how the new ideas grew out of Victorian and into bohemian values.Less

“The Magnet Attracting”: Dreiser's Literary Style

Paul Giles

in Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion

This chapter describes the literary style of Theodore Dreiser, focusing on his novel Carrie. Despite much criticism on the writing style of Dreiser, this novel was praised for its unsparing realism ... More

This chapter describes the literary style of Theodore Dreiser, focusing on his novel Carrie. Despite much criticism on the writing style of Dreiser, this novel was praised for its unsparing realism and its minute detail. Accordingly, Dreiser was admired more as a chronicler of everyday life than as a philosophical sage. The chapter suggests that one of the major strengths of his work is its capacity to bring into view the new scenes and situations of urban life, which had been overlooked or occluded in the more rural fictions of late-nineteenth-century writers.Less

Wavering in Delight: Time, Progress, and the Turn of the Century in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie

Myrto Drizou

in American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity

In this chapter, Drizou argues that Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) questions the rationalization of modern progress by depicting the turn of the century as a moment that wavers between ... More

In this chapter, Drizou argues that Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) questions the rationalization of modern progress by depicting the turn of the century as a moment that wavers between the urgent incalculability of the future and the conventional knowledge of the past, embodied in the two main plotlines of the novel: Carrie’s hasty anticipation of the future and Hurstwood’s steady retreat to the past. For many scholars, the intersecting plotlines of Sister Carrie suggest the contrasting narratives of progress and decline that confirm the irreversibility of fate in turn-of-the-century naturalist texts. Dreiser complicates the teleology of this model, however, by dramatizing the temporal unpredictability of evolutionary tropes (change, adaptability, and chance) to illustrate wavering as a mode that allows his characters to measure their options and remain open to the future. This wavering mode furnishes a new paradigm of thinking about the fin de siècle as an incalculably open jangle that welcomes (and embodies) the resistance to rationalized discourses of modernity. In this sense, Dreiser’s novel prompts us to question and rethink our contemporary processes of rationalization, such as the standardization of knowledge through period-based models of teaching and temporally restrictive paradigms of scholarship.Less

Dreiser, Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair

in Cinematic Fictions: The Impact of the Cinema on the American Novel up to World War II

This chapter begins with a discussion of Theodore Dreiser's interest in cinema, and then considers Sergei Eisenstein's film adaptation of An American Tragedy, which was praised by Dreiser but ... More

This chapter begins with a discussion of Theodore Dreiser's interest in cinema, and then considers Sergei Eisenstein's film adaptation of An American Tragedy, which was praised by Dreiser but rejected by Paramount. It also describes Eisenstein's project with Upton Sinclair to make the film Que Viva Mexico!, which resulted in a shorter film released under the title Thunder Over Mexico in 1933.Less

ROUND ONE!

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

in Mencken: The American Iconoclast

Mencken's penchant for battling with reformers took on a new stand when he launched a public outcry against the censorship of The Genius by Theodore Dresier. Together, Mencken and Dreiser were viewed ... More

Mencken's penchant for battling with reformers took on a new stand when he launched a public outcry against the censorship of The Genius by Theodore Dresier. Together, Mencken and Dreiser were viewed as the drivers of a major literary revolution. At the same time, Mencken met the sister of one of Dreiser's girlfriends — a young writer named Marion Bloom — and began a passionate affair that would continue well into the 1920s. Despite this, Mencken remained depressed about the world situation and his own professional future, and he found life growing unendurably stagnant. Throughout 1916, he constantly thought of Germany, and headed to Berlin to cover the war as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun.Less

Performing the Accident on Purpose

Theodore Dreiser and James Cain

in Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

In the early twentieth century, insurance crime emerged as a social phenomenon that signals not only a sociological shift in criminality but also indicates a radical change in thinking about the ... More

In the early twentieth century, insurance crime emerged as a social phenomenon that signals not only a sociological shift in criminality but also indicates a radical change in thinking about the nature of accidents. This chapter focuses on two novels that reveal how literature is involved in the production of chance: Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) and James Cain's Double Indemnity (1936). Dreiser and Cain literalize the production of chance with their depictions of criminal accident fraud. For Dreiser, this signaled the end of his own realist project. For Cain, however, it raised the possibility that accident production might function as a valuable mode of public performance art in America's emergent welfare state. Cain's Double Indemnity is a classic example of a related subgenre of crime fiction, the falsified accident novel, in which crime masquerades as a matter of chance. Dreiser's An American Tragedy represents the accident as a criminal plot. In different ways, the two novels spell the end of an earlier phase of realism.Less

“Got Over”: The Chorus Girl Novel and the Musical Stage

T. Austin Graham

in The Great American Songbooks: Musical Texts, Modernism, and the Value of Popular Culture

This chapter studies a subgenre of fiction termed “the chorus girl novel.” Such novels, among them Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, depict lowly heroines who ... More

This chapter studies a subgenre of fiction termed “the chorus girl novel.” Such novels, among them Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, depict lowly heroines who are in the process of becoming theater stars, and their plots are somewhat twisted adaptations of Broadway musicals. While such novels are less literally audible than some of the other texts under review in this book, they are every bit as concerned with the ways in which popular music and the popular arts invite readerly participation. The “chorus girl novel,” generally speaking, gives readers a backstage view of an archetypal variety of musical entertainment, and it inducts them into otherwise exclusive realms of artistic production. For both novelists, the act of peeking into the backstages of musical theater presupposes readerly interest in popular culture, and it advances an argument that, when all is said and done, the apprehension of such culture is of real and significant importance.Less

IN THE CRUCIBLE

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

in Mencken: The American Iconoclast

This chapter focuses on Mencken's close relationship with his mother, Anna Mencken, and his depression following her untimely death. It also heralds the break of his friendship with Theodore Dreiser.

Sexual Anti-Semitism and Pornotopia: Theodore Dreiser, Ludwig Lewisohn, and The Harrad Experiment

Josh Lambert

in Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture

This chapter examines why, in the decades after World War II, writers began to understand the explicit representation of sexuality and the embrace of sexual pleasure as effective strategies to ... More

This chapter examines why, in the decades after World War II, writers began to understand the explicit representation of sexuality and the embrace of sexual pleasure as effective strategies to counter the grievous anti-Semitism and other hatreds emerging in America and Europe. It argues that Theodore Dreiser, Ludwig Lewisohn, Robert Rimmer, and the other cultural producers discussed in the chapter were not, in this sense, correct in the belief that the popularization of sexology would reduce the incidence of anti-Semitism. Their vision of a world liberated from sexual suppression and restriction and consequently freed of racism is a misguidedly utopian one, but that did not stop it from serving as inspiration for a great deal of American cultural production that linked Jews and sexual expression or from providing motivation for individual Jewish and non-Jewish Americans to challenge, both in the courts and in the wider culture, the strictures of the law of obscenity.Less

The Demise of Protestant Moral Reform Politics

P. C. Kemeny

in The New England Watch and Ward Society

In the 1920s the Watch and Ward Society suddenly and dramatically lost its role as custodian of morally acceptable literature. In the early 1920s the organization enjoyed a string of victories, ... More

In the 1920s the Watch and Ward Society suddenly and dramatically lost its role as custodian of morally acceptable literature. In the early 1920s the organization enjoyed a string of victories, including the disbarment of the Suffolk Country (Boston) district attorney. A series of controversies in the second half of the decade, however, led to its demise. These controversies began with the Watch and Ward Society’s arrest of H. L. Mencken in the spring of 1926 for selling a banned issue of the American Mercury and continued with the suppression of such popular works as Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and the conviction of a well-respected Cambridge bookdealer and his assistant for selling D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. These controversies helped galvanize a coalition of avant-garde writers, their publishers, and civil libertarians who succeeded in discrediting the Watch and Ward Society and revising Massachusetts’s obscenity law.Less

FRIENDS AND RELATIVES

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

in Mencken: The American Iconoclast

The deaths of Mencken's friends, among them Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, and Joseph Hergesheimer left him free to seek out the company of other standbys: his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and ... More

The deaths of Mencken's friends, among them Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, and Joseph Hergesheimer left him free to seek out the company of other standbys: his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and George Jean Nathan. He also sought out the company of women. Among his siblings, he was closest to August Mencken, who seemed to share his view of the world.Less

The American Scene II: Carrie (1952)

Gabriel Miller

in William Wyler: The Life and Films of Hollywood's Most Celebrated Director

This chapter chronicles the stormy history of Carrie, Wyler's film version of Theodore Dreiser's classic novel Sister Carrie. Also discussed is an early script version written by playwright Clifford ... More

This chapter chronicles the stormy history of Carrie, Wyler's film version of Theodore Dreiser's classic novel Sister Carrie. Also discussed is an early script version written by playwright Clifford Odets (for another production that had been abandoned) — it was utilized but mostly discarded by screenwriters Ruth and Augustus Goetz. Also detailed are Wyler's wooing of Laurence Olivier to play Hurstwood and his contentious relationship with David O. Selznick, husband of co-star Jennifer Jones. The film was compromised by HUAC's influence on Hollywood — its release was delayed (because it was perceived as un-American) and the film was re-edited by the studio while Wyler was in Italy filming Roman Holiday.Less

Journalism and the Urban Novel

Betsy Klimasmith

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 6: The American Novel 1879-1940

This chapter explores the relationship between journalism and literary realism in the United States, with particular reference to the urban novel. Citing the careers of Theodore Dreiser, Stephen ... More

This chapter explores the relationship between journalism and literary realism in the United States, with particular reference to the urban novel. Citing the careers of Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton, it shows that identities as reporters and novelists were intertwined and in fact overlapped. After providing a brief overview of urban journalism in nineteenth-nentury America, the chapter considers some of the basic assumptions that shape the way literary historians distinguish novels from newspapers. It then analyzes three urban novels, Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), Crane's Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), and Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905). It also discusses the state of journalism and the urban novel after World War I.Less

Eighteen. Striking Out

Steve Swayne

in Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life

Schuman had contemplated writing an opera early in his career as a composer. This chapter explores some of the projects Schuman considered, especially a partnership in 1942 with poet Christopher ... More

Schuman had contemplated writing an opera early in his career as a composer. This chapter explores some of the projects Schuman considered, especially a partnership in 1942 with poet Christopher LaFarge that was underwritten by the Carnegie Corporation and administered by the Metropolitan Opera; a television script by Frank Gilroy that became a Glenn Ford film; and an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The bulk of this chapter looks at Schuman's first opera, The Mighty Casey, and its journey from idea to completion to performance. This chapter also looks at the piano piece Voyage, which was co-opted by Martha Graham and turned into a dance score (Theatre for a Voyage). In the middle of the 1950s, Schuman left the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers to join Broadcast Music, Inc.; this decision precipitated the termination of his relationship with G. Schirmer as his principal publisher.Less

American Stoic

Douglas G. Baird

in American Guy: Masculinity in American Law and Literature

The Second Industrial Revolution brought with it enterprises on a scale previously unimagined. In the United States, a small handful of individuals came to lord it over a few key industries. These ... More

The Second Industrial Revolution brought with it enterprises on a scale previously unimagined. In the United States, a small handful of individuals came to lord it over a few key industries. These individuals were a new character type, and new words entered the language for discussing them: tycoon, magnate, mogul. These new men possessed great power, but were just as subject to the law as anyone else. Theodore Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire captures in fiction the life of one of these men—loosely based on the life of Charles Yerkes—and provides a deep study of this distinctly American character and his relationship to the law. Repeated allusions to stoicism are used not to suggest that the financier was an heir to this ancient philosophy, but rather to underscore that these new men were consumed by a fruitless quest to master the world around them and demons within.Less

Vital Reserves Revisited: The Energies of the Social Body

Andrew Lyndon Knighton

in Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth Century America

This chapter explores a range of geographical, economic, and corporeal reconsiderations of the discourse of exhaustion at the turn of the century. In particular, it examines debates that construct an ... More

This chapter explores a range of geographical, economic, and corporeal reconsiderations of the discourse of exhaustion at the turn of the century. In particular, it examines debates that construct an analogy between the individual and the social body, as well as the anxiety about the exhaustion of those bodies and the idle threat of their unproductivity. It first considers how leisure is complemented by a new corporealization of unproductivity—a shift “from idleness to fatigue”—and William James's theory of vital reserves. It then discusses the neutralization of the frontier and its repackaging as idle spectacle within a larger ideological context, along with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's reconceptualization of all human activity as work. It also comments on Theodore Dreiser's apparent theory of the energies of the human organism, in which he describes how the increasing powers of youth tip into inevitable exhaustion and decline with the passage of time.Less

Limited Poetic Liability

Lisa Siraganian

in Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

Of all the corporate person’s vital qualities, the most powerful and contentious was limited liability: the rule that a corporation’s shareholders cannot be held responsible for more than the value ... More

Of all the corporate person’s vital qualities, the most powerful and contentious was limited liability: the rule that a corporation’s shareholders cannot be held responsible for more than the value of the shares they own. This chapter examines challenges to that rule and its effects in the world by analyzing the responses of three very different writers: law professor Maurice Wormser, novelist Theodore Dreiser, and poet and lawyer Charles Reznikoff. Should corporations be understood as veils for individuals or as fully formed entities inextricably meshed with their managers, owners, and environment? Each writer struggled to know a corporate person behind its “entity veil” (as Wormser terms it), coming to see that limited liability functioned to minimize the essential duties of managers, employees, and owners. While Wormser recommends “veil piercing” when corporations are taken over by nefarious individuals, Dreiser’s The Financier (1912) uncovers problems with this strategy, and Reznikoff’s epic poem Testimony (1965–78), maps out systemic injuries that limited liability generated. Dreiser and Reznikoff deploy literary form to think about this corporate person precisely when it did not acknowledge all of its attributes as a legal person. When the corporate person devolved and acted more like a tool or machine, how was society supposed to treat it? This chapter’s three conceptual explorations of corporate limited liability shine light on the legal system’s deficiencies when contending with the corporation’s social role. Each writer begins, in his own way, to envision solutions other than strictly legal remedies.Less

Broadway Bound

Allan R. Ellenberger

in Miriam Hopkins: Life and Films of a Hollywood Rebel

Hopkins first Broadway job is as a chorus girl in Irving Berlin’s The Music Box Revue. She goes between vaudeville shows until she lands Little Jessie James, where she receives good notices. After ... More

Hopkins first Broadway job is as a chorus girl in Irving Berlin’s The Music Box Revue. She goes between vaudeville shows until she lands Little Jessie James, where she receives good notices. After that, she receives small parts in Broadway plays, working consistently but relatively unnoticed, and picks up a husband, actor Brandon Peters. Finally, she catches a break and lands a role in the successful Broadway production of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Just before the play premieres, she dumps Peters and, within weeks, begins an affair with neophyte publisher Bennett Cerf, following that with a passionate relationship with playwright Patrick Kearny. He opens another world for her, introducing her to the literary greats. Kearny, an alcoholic, is more serious about a relationship than Hopkins is. When Hopkins refuses his marriage proposal one too many times, he chases her through the streets of Greenwich Village with a knife, threatening to cut her throat. Hopkins goes to Rochester for the summer, working in stock with George Cukor.Less