Our lively arts: American culture as theatrical culture, 1922--1931

In the first decades of the twentieth century, critics like H.L. Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks vociferously expounded a deep and profound disenchantment with American art and culture. At a time when American popular entertainments were expanding exponentially, and at a time when European high modernism was in full flower, American culture appeared to these critics to be at best a quagmire of philistinism and at worst an oxymoron. Today there is still general agreement that American arts "came of age" or "arrived" in the 1920s, thanks in part to this flogging criticism, but also because of the powerful influence of European modernism.;Yet, this assessment was not, at the time, unanimous, and its conclusions should not, I argue, be taken as foregone. In this dissertation, I present crucial case studies of Constance Rourke (1885-1941) and Gilbert Seldes (1893-1970), two astute but understudied cultural critics who saw the same popular culture denigrated by Brooks or Mencken as vibrant evidence of exactly the modern American culture they were seeking. In their writings of the 1920s and 1930s, Rourke and Seldes argued that our "lively arts" (Seldes' formulation) of performance---vaudeville, minstrelsy, burlesque, jazz, radio, and film---contained both the roots of our own unique culture as well as the seeds of a burgeoning modernism. In their analysis, Rourke and Seldes stood against easy conceptual categories (especially "highbrow vs. lowbrow") that did not account for the richness of American culture. Both resisted the tendency to evaluate American art by the standards of European modernism. And by foregrounding matters of race and ethnic identity (even when they dealt imperfectly with them), they showed popular entertainment to be a matter of national significance. Most importantly, the American culture they defined was, above all, theatrical; it craved performance, it was performance.;My research project, therefore, finds its mission in relation to two primary developments: (1) the growth of American modernist arts and (2) the growth of cultural criticism of those arts. My argument, however, cuts a path between---and often in opposition to---the standard explanations for both of these developments. Indeed, against the received wisdom that modern American culture depends upon the pervasive spread of European modernism, I argue that American popular performance itself is the necessary foundation for our modern culture.