Between the Self and the Public

Book excerpt: In the study of American literature there persists an assumption that literary naturalism was overtaken around 1910 or so by modernism, a mode of writing that represents a clear advancement in technique and subject matter. This idea has been reinforced by the segregation of academic literary study into distinct periods of specialization, a disciplinary cordon that helps to explain an otherwise puzzling absence of critical work that seeks to identify elements of continuity between the two literary modes. My dissertation argues that naturalism and modernism ought not to be regarded as ancestor and successor upon an evolutionary timeline of development, but rather as complementary strategies of representation that are 'co-implicated' in American urban fiction. In the dissertation I maintain that during the fin-de-siecle period of accelerated industrialization and urbanization a new system of cultural selection called 'the promotional matrix' begins to fuse and focalize public and private spheres so that individual identities are defined vis-a-vis the wider social system, which is itself increasingly devoted to the promotion of individual identities. Pace the poststructuralist critics of the last twenty years who have sought to debunk the oppositional status of naturalism, it is my contention that the most vital and lasting legacy of the original generation of American naturalists can be found in their shared commitment to describing and interrogating the system of structured competition that was coming to mediate between the self and the public in the United States. Indeed, I argue that naturalism constitutes a usable literary counter-tradition for the writers of modernism, one that they freely adapted and transformed in accordance with changing literary techniques and political circumstances. Throughout the dissertation I approach questions of literary form by considering how fiction might be related to such disparate discourses as urban sociology, economic data, cultural geography, popular culture, critical theory and literary biography. While my analysis might be accurately characterized as 'materialist' or 'historicist' I have also been crucially informed by deconstruction, gender studies and psychoanalysis, methods that have helped me to more fully comprehend the co-extensive realms of social space and representation.