CHALLENGING MASS CULTURE: AMERICAN WRITERS AND LITERARY AUTHORITY, 1880-1940 (JAMES, DREISER, DOS PASSOS, WEST)

The relationship between literature and mass culture in America was given its contemporary form at the end of the nineteenth century. New technologies of communication combined with the development of consumer capitalism to produce the journalism, movies, and mass-market fiction characteristic of our consumer society. The new media shaped and were in turn legitimated by a mass audience. Moreover, they transformed notions of how to appeal to that audience: they emphasized clarity of style, for instance, in order to facilitate their "consumption.".;The creation of a separate "literary space" represented these authors' most powerful claim to cultural authority. In mass culture, historians have argued, status and authority are ceded to professional elites who command expert knowledge and esoteric languages. Striving for professional status themselves, writers at the turn of the century legitimated literary writing by insisting on the difficulty of their narrative strategies, and the necessary competence of readers able to understand their work. By defining their discourse against that of mass culture, they enforced their "right to speak" about cultural matters--a "right" that has been affirmed by professional writers and critics within the university, who bestow power on the complex works they study.;Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Nathanael West experienced mass culture directly through their work in journalism, screen writing, and magazines. Their careers and novels bear marks of that experience: the new cultural power of the media reinforced their desire to claim a more professional standing for literature, and led them to make significant alterations in their literary discourse. All of these novelists responded to the media by inscribing mass discourses within their texts. But rather than making their work more accessible to a mass audience, this rhetorical accommodation modified and subverted mass discourses. Using obscure, "private" languages to challenge the stylistic clarity of the media, each writer defined an "implied audience" of privileged, competent readers.