| "Sympathetic Disaffections" argues that a group of writers working at the turn into the twentieth century found many ways and reasons to problematize sympathy, and suggests that this discontent about sympathy affects identity and impacts literary form. Examining writings by, primarily, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton, the study shows that these authors persistently invoke the potential of sympathy, but at the same time elaborate various fantasies about why that sympathy is finally unworkable. In this sense, these writers prove to be "ambivalent"---albeit in different ways which the study seeks to specify and name---about the power of sympathy. Because sympathy is a way of conceptualizing relations between self and other, individual and society, nature and culture---in other words, identity---and because it is additionally a way of thinking about processes of writing and reading, these ambivalences are not just "felt" by the writers, but profoundly constitute them, forming the writers' identities and shaping their literary styles and projects. Further, by calling these narrative critiques of sympathy "fantasies," the project emphasizes that its objective is not to judge the validity or veracity of the objections; it is invested, rather, in explaining what is at stake in such arguments. Instead of dismantling the critiques, the project takes them seriously in the belief that they can tell us something about these authors, their works, and turn-of-the century cultures.;The dissertation makes this argument through a series of close readings that serve as case studies. After an introduction that analyzes the notion and history of sympathy and situates the project among existing critical work, each of the four following chapters centers on an objection to sympathy, as seen in the work of one or two thinkers who stand in particular relations to a literary genre. Chapter 1 focuses on London and his problems with the gendered nature of sympathy, and argues that this ambivalence structures naturalism. Conrad's worry about the narcissistic potential of sympathy, which reveals his notions of race and sexuality, and impacts modernism, is the subject of chapter 2. Chapter 3 discusses Du Bois's lament about the historical disappearance of conditions that would enable sympathy between races, and how this melancholia shapes his writing and produces regional and migration narratives. Chapter 4 looks at Wharton's anxiety about sympathy's preclusion of true desire, and argues that this construction produces the sexual marketplace. In this fashion, the study elucidates recurrent literary dissatisfactions with sympathy that nevertheless retain an affection for such sympathy. |
