Dialectical metafiction and the self-conscious subject of American Modernism

In the past twenty years, many scholars on the Left have attempted to explain a turn to conservatism and an accompanying melancholy within American Modernism during the canonization of its literary texts, or they have attempted to "recover" the once-thriving but now repressed political energies of Leftist literary texts. These projects raise questions about the validity of the conservative literary history we have received, but they also raise questions about the subjectivity and legitimacy of revisionist histories. Indeed, recent revisionist histories participate in a key assumption of cultural studies that textual interpretation and historiography are inescapably subjective activities, and they treat all texts and history-as-it-may-have-happened as "things in themselves" that can never be known. This dissertation challenges those philosophical assumptions of contemporary postmodern theory by locating them within the continuum of capitalist ideology. A shadowy metaphysics still lurks within the assumption of subjectivity even in the theoretical principles of the critics of the Left. What is needed to write a more objective literary history, to recover Leftist energies, and to explain the turn to conservative melancholy in American Modernism is an anti-humanist, dialectical methodology that can escape the subjective interpretive codes and practices of liberal humanism. A more effective recovery project would include a set of literary texts within Modernism that manifest not only self-consciousness (as did conservative modernism) but also a scientific knowledge of capitalist ideology and its self-conscious literary forms. The conservative Modernism of writers like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and the progressive Modernism of writers like Carl Sandburg aimed at just such a scientific knowledge, but they did not understand the limits of their own formal aesthetics. As ideological products, their formal experiments pushed toward the limits of subjectivity without, ultimately, escaping capitalist ideology in its literary forms or grasping its production of meaning within economic and class contradiction. That same capitalist ideology prevented critics from recognizing that Sarah N. Cleghorn, Anna Louise Strong, and F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved political consciousness through their understanding of socialism and the dialectic. They wrote dialectical metafiction, a form that reproduces the ideological forms of consciousness while contextualizing them within determinate levels of material and ideological reproduction. These writers of the Teens and Twenties used dialectical thought and metafictional (or metapoetic) strategies to achieve a version of the "alienation effect" (also known as the distancing effect or Verfremdungseffekt) over a decade before its methodological development in the 1930s by Bertolt Brecht. Although dialectical metafiction is a rare form, it shows the way to recover Leftist energies and to rewrite the history of Modernism objectively in scholarly practice and in the classroom. It demonstrates a way to overcome the ideological consciousness that still lurks within the seductive, melancholy literary forms of conservative modernism, within postmodern theory in general, and within cultural studies in particular.