| The 1990s witnessed a resurgence of critical interest in American proletarian literature, particularly among scholars intent on expanding the canon to include texts variously marked by the intersection of class and gender, race, or some other category of identity. As primarily an intervention in canon formation, the ongoing "recovery" of proletarian literature has sought to demonstrate a lasting impact on American culture and to identify "great" authors or works. This dissertation proposes a different approach, one focused on issues of autonomy, participation, and everyday life. While it admits the ideological role of class struggle as a powerful imaginary, this approach contests the centrality of class membership. Although class struggle and exploitation informed the subject matter of proletarian writing and, in many cases, materially impacted the everyday lives of participants, "working-class"---or even, in this sense, "proletarian"---is inadequate as a signifier for the fixed or ascribed identity of participants.; As a slogan, "proletarian literature" identified a set of questions and desires that were explored through the articulation of subcultural identity and through more or less coordinated attempts to create participatory forms of culture. Within the context of a dominant culture that regulated participation in cultural production as much by constructing notions of expertise, aesthetic value, and taste as by monopolizing the physical means of cultural production and distribution, "proletarian literature" rallied formations around do-it-yourself principles, produced fetishized notions of authenticity and amateurism, and provoked endless debates over definition. Moreover, during the Depression, the phrase "proletarian literature" had particular resonance because it invited participation and, through its relation to American literature, offered a connection to tradition. Proletarian literature also supplied a powerful language of opposition within which individual "proletarians" could articulate their own experiences.; Local subcultures, and the literary ephemera they produce, are often rendered invisible by the discourse of success and failure that typically operates in the identification of the objects of literary analysis. This dissertation explores some of the complex cultural transactions that underlie distinctions between success and failure by focusing on the processes of recuperation and appropriation that produce resistance even as they produce "great" writers or works. |
