Published Spring/Summer 2008
 
Criticism in the Iron Mills: New Working-Class Studies and the Class Turn
(on Gavin Jones, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945 [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008]; John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, eds., New Working-Class Studies [Ithaca: ILR P, 2005]; Eric Schocket, Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature [Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006])
by John Marsh | ns 70
In March 2002, Larry J. Griffin and Maria Tempenis published an article, "Class, Multiculturalism, and the American Quarterly," which demonstrated that while gender and multicultural approaches to the field of American Studies had not displaced class analysis over the past fifty years (1949 to 1999), class had nevertheless "received...little attention in AQ" (90). For many Americanists (who prior to Griffin's and Tempenis's charts and graphs may have believed that regression analysis was an obscure strand of Freudian thought), the article demonstrated quantifiably what they probably already suspected—that "relatively little of the Quarterly's pages have ever been used to explore social class" (90). "It is clear," Griffin and Tempenis conclude, "that American studies, pre- or post-1960s, has never much 'done' class" and that "class, whether 'pure' or 'enfolded,' has never really had its 'particular moment' in the field" (93).
Since then class does seem to be having its "particular moment" in literary studies, as evidenced by the books under review here. These books arrive in the context of a more general turn towards the new working-class studies, whose origins lie with a series of conferences in the mid-1990s at Youngstown State University sponsored by the Center for Working-Class Studies, co-directed by John Russo, a professor of labor studies, and Sherry Lee Linkon, a professor of English. These conferences have resulted in an edited collection, New Working-Class Studies, with contributions by some of the leading figures in the field. So what is this new field of working-class studies? And how has it manifested itself in a single discipline, literary studies, and a single sub-field of that discipline, American literature?
"What's New about New Working-Class Studies?" Russo and Linkon ask in their introduction, and it is a useful question, especially since many readers will not have known that there was an "old" working-class studies. According to Russo and Linkon, old working-class studies consisted of the fields of labor studies, labor history, cultural studies, and, for lack of a better term, what Russo and Linkon call multiculturalism.
From labor studies, a movement that includes the workers' education efforts of the 1930s and the liberation theology of Paulo Freire, new working-class studies borrows its commitment to a class-inflected pedagogy. In the last two or three decades, the demographics of higher education have changed considerably, so much so that our idea of the normal college student—someone between 18 and 22 years old attending a major public or private university—no longer reflects reality. Instead, more and more students are the first in their families to go to college, and these students—as well as the displaced manufacturing or white-collar workers also increasingly enrolling in colleges—tend to start their educations much later than the "normal" college students and far more frequently attend regional, branch, and community colleges. Thus many participants in working-class studies, who find themselves teaching these "non-traditional" working-class students, have begun to ask whether conventional pedagogical approaches developed for a very different demographic will suffice. They have returned to earlier experiments in workers' education for clues about how best to introduce working-class students to individual disciplines and to higher education more generally.
In terms of research, new working-class studies probably shares as much with labor history as with any other of its foundational fields, although one must immediately distinguish between the "old" labor history of John Commons and the Wisconsin School and the "new" labor history associated with the likes of E. P. Thompson in England and Herbert Gutman in the United States. The latter emerged from the social history of the 1960s, history told "from the bottom up," and was organized less around the formation of unions and union leaders (as the old labor history supposedly was) than around communities of workers who may or may not have joined unions but who nevertheless left their own histories of working-class consciousness. As with the new labor studies, new working-class studies shares an impulse to document the experiences and voices of those workers. Nevertheless, as the historian Elizabeth Faue notes in her contribution to Russo and Linkon's collection, the influence has not been mutual, as by and large labor historians have kept at arms' length from working-class studies.
One reason for the distance between these fields may be that new working-class studies seems far more interested in present workers than in past ones, and in that respect it shares much more with disciplines like sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Indeed, with its interest in representations of working-class life in popular culture, the formation of identity, and the recovery and discovery of lost or marginalized voices, new working-class studies owes a great deal to cultural studies. But where contemporary cultural studies trained most of its energies on the influence and intersection of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, the new working-class studies pays far more attention to the formative influence of class, as well as to ongoing inequalities of income, education, and power.
The relation of working-class studies and multiculturalism is dialectical, borrowing from the latter its interest in power and social justice but resenting its relative silence on issues of class. "Somehow," Russo and Linkon note, "liberal and leftist politics and the social movements of the 1960s led to an academic culture that pays relatively careful [attention to] race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender but views class as somehow already covered" (5). Unlike Walter Benn Michaels or (as we will see) Gavin Jones, however, new working-class studies does not challenge the study of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, but instead "argues that class should be taken as seriously as race and gender, given as much critical attention, questioned as deeply, and brought into not only academic but also public discussions of identity, difference, and cultural politics" (12). Ideally, new working-class studies aims at what Russo and Linkon call, borrowing a term from Bonnie Thornton Dill, "intersectional studies," which "analyzes how multiple social categories work together" (12). The only caveat is that class must be the main road in that intersection.
One new development in working-class studies is its interdisciplinarity, with contributions from the usual suspects (labor relations, sociology, history, and English) as well as the unusual (geography, film, economics). Another comparatively new feature is the field's activist politics. As Russo and Linkon put it, new working-class studies "is not just an academic exercise" but rather seeks "to advance the struggle for social and economic justice for working-class people" (15). The field imagines itself exercising real influence outside institutions of higher education, whether through community-based teaching, expressing solidarity with workers, or, more generally, changing what Jack Metzgar calls the "American class vernacular," that is, the annoying habit US politics and culture have of, as he puts it, "forgetting that there is a working class" (189).
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The new, class-inflected work being done in literary studies explores how that limited class vernacular came to be. It does not treat conventional working-class literature—that is, literature produced by workers. Rather, it tends to examine writers who viewed workers and the poor through what gets called the "middle-class lens" or, elsewhere, "cross-class encounters." Eric Schocket's Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature illustrates this concern with "the middle-class lens." The book scrutinizes "a history of cross-class representation in the United States"— the representation of workers and the poor by mostly middle-class writers—and tracks these cross-class representations through each of the major movements in US literature up to and including the 1930s. Like Amy Lang's recent book The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton UP, 2003), Schocket is interested in how writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, W. D. Howells, Stephen Crane, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Meridel Le Sueur displace class conflict onto ideologically safer terrain, although, unlike Lang, he relies on other, more Marxist tropes—reification, objectification, management, containment—to define this process. For Schocket, US literature can be organized around a series of "glimpses, looks, and unveilings" of the poor and working poor. That American readers and writers must constantly "discover" poverty and inequality suggests not that they have an abiding humanitarian streak but that they easily forget about or rationalize class divisions within the supposedly and exceptionally classless United States. As Schocket quotes Ann Cvetkovich, "Rather than leading to social change, the expression of feeling can become an end in itself or an individualist solution to systemic problems" (6).
It follows then, that the great danger to be fought when reading working-class literature is, as Schocket puts it, "fetishization, reification, and objectification" (25), and these dangers lurk around many corners. As readers of working-class literature and spectators of workers as objects, readers might think of themselves as somehow outside the very processes that have created suffering workers. Similarly, the writers who have created these representations have more often than not, also separated workers from the capitalist process that made them or substituted another, more easily managed process for the capitalist one. In short, Schocket is telling "a tale of complicity and co-optation." "Culture does play a compensatory role," Schocket writes, invoking Fredric Jameson, "but in most cases, it does so in such a way to present, rather than enable, anything worth calling rectification" (31-32). "Indeed," Schocket adds, "until the 1930s, representations of labor in the United States so overwhelmingly tended to enact fictitious resolutions to real struggles over class that this may accurately be called their 'cultural work'" (32). For Schocket, the role of the critic is to fill out these incomplete representations; to, as he puts it, "relate the conditions of their blockage" (26). In sum, if you thought you—or anyone—reading working-class literature would change the world or improve the lives of workers, think again. More likely than not, you've been duped.
For all of Schocket's deeply historicist approaches to the literary works he considers and the astonishing insights he offers about them, there is nevertheless something disturbingly ahistorical about this Marxist approach to working-class literature. True, none of the writers Schocket examines offer thoroughgoing Marxist critiques of exploitation; none share the correct views of capitalism that Schocket holds. If your hope is for a post-capitalist future, as Schocket admits his is, then these works will almost always disappoint. But if your hope, as I admit mine is, is for the gradual lessening of human suffering over time, you will have greater difficulty summoning the outrage necessary to condemn works that are imperfectly anti-capitalist but nevertheless—the glass being half full, as it were—remain anti-capitalist in some meaningful way. Another way to put this is that for Schocket what matters is that capitalism and exploitation reign now as much as they did in the 1850s or 1930s, but it does not follow that capitalism has remained unchanged over that period. Say what you will about the continuing horrors of poverty, inequality, and life under capitalism, at least in the United States and in other Western European countries we do have a kinder, gentler form of capitalism. With the occasional exception that proves the rule, we have given up slavery, child labor, and, however inadequately, acknowledged the right of workers to form unions. Something enabled people to make those changes, perhaps even some of the very texts that Schocket exposes as not thoroughly anti-capitalist. As a result, and this may just be the diminished expectations of someone living through late capitalism under a thoroughly reactionary Bush presidency, it is hard to remain as disappointed with these works of literature as Schocket implies we should be.
If Eric Schocket is ambivalent towards the field of working-class studies, resisting its culturalist politics and bumbling optimism about its canons of working-class literature, Gavin Jones, in his American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945 is downright hostile. Jones' hostility arises from his concern with how the discipline—of English, of American studies, of working-class literature—has thus far managed to ignore almost completely a category as seemingly crucial as that of poverty. "Why has an overwhelming concern with the socially marginalized," Jones asks, "emerged without a sufficient framework in which to situate an explicit discussion of material deprivation?" (6). In his introduction, Jones tells us why. Like Lang, Schocket, and nearly every other critic in the field of working-class studies, Jones recognizes that the neglect of poverty doubtless owes something to the more general neglect of class in literary studies; like those critics, too, Jones takes a swing at the other categories—race, gender, nation—that have, to use his favorite word, "overwhelmed" class analyses.
Yet those explanations do not account for why, even after class has begun to have its moment, poverty has remained neglected. One reason, Jones offers, is that the turn towards class in literary studies suffers from a "perennial interest in the middle class" (8), with "how middle-class writers represented inequality" (7). As in Schocket, that approach may tell us a great deal about middle-class writers and the reproduction of capital, but it will leave us in relative ignorance about poverty in and of itself. Jones saves the bulk of his ire, though, for what he calls "a composite form of class analysis," in which class is "overwhelmed by" "multicultural concerns" (13). For example, Jones argues that Eric Schocket's analysis of Rebecca Harding Davis' "Life in the Iron Mills" "questionably [takes] the racial part for the whole" and "displace[s] class almost wholly into racial questions of whiteness" (14). These composite studies, Jones argues, therefore "verge on giving race [and gender] an enabling priority in [their] capacity to generate class sensibility" (15). Lost amidst all the connections to race and gender, though, is poverty itself, its sheer material lack.
Seeking to fill that void, Jones offers an "initial theory of poverty," one that captures the material and nonmaterial dimensions of poverty, its status as objective and subjective, economic and non-economic, as well as the questions of psychology, emotion, culture, and ethics that attend it. Jones also makes a compelling argument for the special place of literature in understanding these dialectics of poverty. "Literature," he writes, "reveals how poverty is established, defined, and understood, as a psychological and cultural problem that depends fundamentally on the language used to describe it" (4). His readings—of Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright—make good on that promise, although too often they seem ruled by the test of whether a given author or work believes that poverty results from individual, cultural, or socioeconomic forces. To be sure, that is a crucial distinction in terms of social justice. What someone thinks about why people are and remain poor will likely determine whether he or she thinks that poverty ought to be or even can be ameliorated. But in the readings themselves that approach can become a bit mechanistic. Jones produces far more interesting readings when he digs into the historical details of writers' views about and texts' representations of poverty, regardless of whether they or it pass the test of properly ascribing poverty a socioeconomic cause.
For all their differences and grudges, though, Schocket and Jones demonstrate the insights that stand to be gained from exploring how class and culture interact. Ten years ago, when I began studying working-class literature, one was grateful for any scholar willing to take seriously the question of class and American literature. That we now have a number of scholars taking up this question—and disagreeing with each other—is a welcome development. Indeed, one hopes that class will have more than just a moment in American studies.
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