White-collar culture: Work, organization, and American fiction, 1943-1959

"White-Collar Culture: Work, Organization, and American Fiction, 1943-1959" argues that post-World War II US fiction has been centrally shaped by concerns over the de-individualizing and mystifying effects of white-collar work. By the mid-1950s the US workforce had become primarily white-collar, and the accompanying organization of mental labor has had a profound effect on the self-conception of those who write and read literature. The expansion of higher education and the mass media in the postwar period led to both the increasing circulation of formerly elite intellectual high culture and the increasingly middle-class status of intellectuals. High cultural intellectuals who had inherited the anti-bourgeois ethos of modernism, and who now found their own work increasingly institutionalized in the white-collar workplaces of the academy and other mass media, pursued various strategies to stress the differences between themselves and conformist organization men. Ironically, however, these strategies, especially the turn to ever more existential versions of modern "alienation," were quickly adopted by the white-collar masses themselves. "White-Collar Culture" reads fiction by Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick to show how the postwar transformation in middle-class identity, and in the relationship of intellectuals to the middle-class, constituted both a crisis and an opportunity for the production of fiction. Generally seen as a sterile interregnum between the triumphs of modernism and the revivifying emergence of postmodernism, the late forties and fifties actually constitute a key time for twentieth-century US literary culture, in which the theory and practice of literature shaped and was shaped by the broadest cultural concerns. Fiction of the postwar period simultaneously obscures and reveals its engagement with the problems of white-collar work in ways that continue to have relevance for our culture, in particular the profound and spurious gulf it imagines between the humanities and the business world. In examining the origins of this gulf, "White-Collar Culture" seeks to demystify and historicize it.