| Vast Expertise explores the narrative construction of displaced professional characters in twentieth-century culture, focusing on several key types: the modernist intellectual, the hard-boiled detective, the contract killer, the servant, and the post-colonial bildungsroman protagonist. The “vast” frameworks for expertise that I discuss arise from the cosmopolitan contexts of literary modernism, internationalism between the wars, post-colonialism, and contemporary globalization. In addition to the far-reaching, often utopian scope of their aims for modern expertise, the figures I focus on exhibit various forms of lonely social displacement from the “knowable communities” that class, nation, the novel, and other forms of imagined social collectivity are supposed, theoretically, to provide. Previous literary critical, historical, and sociological studies have emphasized the affinities between genres of professional life, like the detective novel, and the reinforcement of national borders, national solidarity, class affiliation, and imperial identity. In contrast, I argue that crucial, yet underexamined formal affinities develop between professional and global imaginaries within the historical contexts I discuss, stemming from the challenges that both pose to critical models for community. My introduction focuses on Raymond Chandler and his cosmopolitan conception of American authorial professionalism, which I connect to the hard-boiled detective's paradoxically antisocial and sentimental, professionally distant relations with male clients. Chapter Two focuses on the Edwardian public intellectual, internationalism and cultural studies, primarily through the works of H. G. Wells and their long reception-history. Chapter Three focuses on the international contract killer, the post-war “scholarship boy,” and the sought-after securities of long-distance professional identity, from Graham Greene's thrillers through neo-noir film. The fourth and concluding chapters focus on late-twentieth-century negotiations of “vast expertise,” in Raymond Williams's and Kazuo Ishiguro's meditations on the persistent legacies of servant identity in professional life, and in Zadie Smith's return to the troubled critical histories of Enlightenment and upward mobility in the bildungsroman. I ultimately argue that attempts to stretch modern professionalism over “vast” spheres of influence reveal underexamined forms of professional affect—self-loathing, sentimentality, defensiveness, lonely uncertainty—that anticipate certain “compromised” modern formulations of collectivity. |
