Education in irony: United States 'literacy crisis' and the literature of American Bildung (Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather)

This dissertation uses the historical and theoretical resources of the fields of rhetoric and composition studies, as well as the symbolic resources of prose fiction narratives by four canonic US writers (Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, James Weldon Johnson, and Willa Cather), to trace historical shifts in the way educational development, intellectual ability, and pedagogic work were imagined by Americans between the Civil War and World War One. Sometimes referred to as the period of America's “coming of age,” this epoch saw both the rise of the modern German-derived research university and the formation of college English as we know it today. These two developments, I contend, contributed in tandem to the emergence of the concept of “literacy,” something inextricable from yet irreducible to what we call “intelligence”—both a necessary ingredient of educational development (Bildung, culture), and, in its familiar modality of “crisis,” a constant threat to or interruption of it.; Through discussions of the tropes and themes of Bildung and literacy in The Portrait of a Lady, Sister Carrie, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and The Professor's House, I assess these texts' complex investments in, first, an idiosyncratically American cultural rhetoric about “mind,” and second, an “ironic pedagogy” whose privileged mechanism is the aesthetic form of the novel of educational failure. I also discuss the vicissitudes of “academic talent” and “innate ability” in the contexts of class, race, and gender difference, all of which strongly inflect the transference of the patterns of the European Bildungsroman to a US social context. The general trajectory of the readings is from philosophical discussions of Bildung theory toward more practical, institutional questions about the role of literacy in contemporary liberal education. In my conclusion I take up a different kind of Bildung narrative, Bill Readings' The University in Ruins, applying the notion of irony that has emerged from previous readings to what he calls the “scene of teaching.”...