Rhetorics of whiteness: Race, class and the development of early American modernism

For over a decade a critical discourse on whiteness has been evolving in several areas of academic study. Growing out of multiculturalism, feminist studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies and other disciplines, whiteness studies offer a new epistemological lens through which to interrogate and analyze culture, rhetoric, and literature. However, whiteness studies---and therefore this dissertation---is controversial. While some people see it as a narcissistic re-centering of the white subject position in the face of multicultural efforts to dismantle racism, others see the need for a critical inquiry into an "invisible whiteness" which appears to privilege white people in various ways.; This dissertation examines the marginalization of racialized others in selected works of literary Modernism and its relationship to representations of labor exploitation in an effort to find out how marginalization as a form of literary whiteness contributes to the rhetoric and development of early Modernism, in order to help my reader better understand how this literature contributes ideologically to the social consciousness of its readers. I argue that notions of human will, and the capacity for choice well as the literary tropes of grace under pressure , and the celebration of danger function as rhetorical elements of literary whiteness.; Chapter two examines texts representing various disciplines in order to construct an epistemology of whiteness that answers questions such as how whiteness remains peculiarly unmarked at the same time that it dominates our culture. Chapter three examines how many of these ideas get woven into literary texts of the North American canon of early modernism specifically. Also discussed is the relationship between modernism, individualism, and rhetoric. Chapter four articulates and demonstrates a theory of literary whiteness primarily using Ernest Hemingway's collection of his first forty-nine short stories and secondarily using Clifford Odets's play, Waiting for Lefty and John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Chapter five examines Odets's Waiting for Lefty, Mike Gold's Hoboken Blues, Or the Black Rip Van Winkle, A Modern Negro Fantasia on an Old American Theme and William Attaway's Blood on the Forge as texts that resist literary whiteness in various ways.