Literature as self-help: Postwar United States fiction and the middle-class hunger for trouble (John Cheever, Erica Jong, David Foster Wallace)

My dissertation analyzes postwar U.S. fiction as a response to needs, anxieties, and ambitions widely shared amongst the middle class. According to recent scholars, including Janice Radway and Elizabeth Long, middle-class readers often turn to fiction for the same reasons they turn to self-help books: in search of guidance on how to lead their lives and how to negotiate various social and psychological challenges. While serious critics have generally dismissed such practical, “middlebrow” functions, in my view the needs of middle-class readers and the efforts of fiction writers to satisfy them can be quite complex and thus demand scrutiny. I contend that postwar fiction offers these readers fantasy-fulfillment, reassurance, skills and attitudes necessary to navigate various social hierarchies, and also new modes of disaffection and alienation. All of these forms of knowledge make it possible for individuals to cope and succeed within the given social and political structures and hence play a “therapeutic” role, but in many cases they also provoke, paradoxically, the cultivation of dissatisfaction, the articulation of shared grievances, and the production of powerful political critiques.; In each chapter, I situate the literary work in relation to major cultural, social, and political developments, and important self-help texts. In Chapter One, I examine the explosion of suburbia in the 1950s and the strategies John Cheever provides in his collection, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories, for maintaining individuality and mobility within a homogenizing cultural landscape. Chapter Two focuses on the second-wave feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and the various meanings of feminine self-improvement it mobilized; I examine Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and the role her sexually adventuresome protagonist Isadora Wing plays as a source of identification for middle-class women struggling to redefine their identities. In Chapter Three, I investigate the obsession with addiction in the late twentieth century and David Foster Wallace's response in Infinite Jest, offering readers basic humanistic values espoused by Alcoholics Anonymous, including empathy and sincerity, as a replacement for an emphasis on immediate, shallow pleasures and glib postmodern irony, which Wallace sees as conducive to addictive tendencies.