America and its discontents: Cynicism in the American modernist imagination (Henry Adams, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West)

My dissertation examines cynicism in American modernist literature and culture in order to recover it as a critically and ethically relevant term. Far from an ironic ethical retreat from the world, cynicism is a moral and intellectual anguish occasioned by a conviction that ethical desire is disproportionate to the world it occupies. Because cynicism ambivalently inhabits cultural norms and threatens their hegemony, its analysis sheds light on the conferment of cultural legitimacy.; I begin by demonstrating modern cynicism's continuity with ancient cynicism as an embedded critique of hegemony. Not principally characterized by false consciousness, cynics are born of too much knowledge; they desire the same anchoring ideals they are convinced are illusory. I dispute the prevailing assumption that cynic disillusionment can—and should—be corrected. In examinations primarily of Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, this dissertation focuses on human intelligence's brutalized idealism. Each of the books analyzed here narrates the apperception of idealistic desire exceeding the approbation of questioning intelligence and skepticism escaping the boundaries laid down by moral imagination. Intelligent despair in these modern texts has not entirely silenced a demand for ethical scrutability.; These books deny the possibility of redemption in the wake of a devastatingly persuasive knowledge. If the promise of ethical engagement survives, it endures in the volatile tension between desire and skepticism. My focus is not individual character; it is the assemblage of formal and textual strategies that cannot reject the cynical bind in which characters find themselves. Situated historically and stylistically between the critical explorations of realism and the confident politicism of the 1930s, these texts provide an occasion to examine the ideology and techniques of American modern literature as a representation of ambivalence.