Caveman, genius, artist, entrepreneur: success and self-realization from literary naturalism to advice literature

This essay examines the dramatization of a new model of selfhood in U.S. naturalist fiction at the turn of the twentieth century and how it was taken up by advice literature during the interwar years. By tracing a lineage of the self through the characterological types of the caveman, genius, artist, and entrepreneur, the essay shows how the construction of the caveman as a more vital self than the bourgeois individual at the turn of the twentieth century morphed into a biologized notion of Romantic genius and further into configurations of artists and entrepreneurs as the century progressed. As the types shade into each other in naturalist fiction and advice literature, they represent a new model for successful working and living that fuses expressive and economic goals, and which anticipates contemporary constructions of work as a pursuit of creative self-expression and self-actualization

Cormac McCarthy and the Genre Turn in Contemporary Literary Fiction

The wholesale embrace of genre fiction by contemporary literary writers is currently reorganizing the literary field. This essay looks at the role that genre has played in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction since his turn to the Western with Blood Meridian (1985). It assesses his genre fiction vis-à-vis Mark McGurl’s influential study of the importance of creative writing programs for postwar US fiction in The Program Era (2009). In contrast to the modernist aesthetic institutionalized in program era fiction, I argue that the recent genre turn significantly changes the relationship of literary fiction to reality as well as to institutions. I suggest that the turn to genre should be considered the formal response to a crisis in reality, triggered by twenty-first-century reconceptualizations of the world and our place in it, which requires new ways of representing reality. By reading McCarthy’s The Road (2006) alongside Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), I argue that the genre turn in contemporary literary fiction also marks a turn toward institutions, one that both rejects the anti-institutionality of the program era and a return to the modern disciplinary institution in favor of rethinking a value basis for future institutions

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Notes and Querie

The RAFOS System

The RAFOS float is a small neutrally buoyant subsurface order, which, like its big brother the SOFAR float, uses the deep sound (or SOFAR) channel to determine its position as a function of time. Whereas the SOFAR float transmits to moored receivers, the ∼12 kg glass pipe RAFOS float listens for accurately timed signals from moored sound sources to determine its position. The acoustic signal detection and norm of data are all handled by a CMOS microprocessor in the float. The data are recovered at the end of its mission when the float surface and telemeters its memory contents to Systeme Argos, a satellite-borne platform location and data collection system. Just a few sound sources provide navigation for an arbitrary number of floats

American literary naturalism and the cultural foundations of bureaucracy

This paper aims to examine the cultural foundations of the modern bureaucratic order around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. In response to both the breakup of Victorian norms and the social crisis precipitated by the rapid expansion of free market industrial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century, American naturalist writers experimented with new ways to represent and make sense of the social and cultural turmoil of their times. Rejecting a normative order based on Victorian morality as unable to address the problems of economic inequality and exploitation, this paper will explore how their art promoted a vision of rational management that ultimately helped to reorientate their culture toward the dawning bureaucratic ethos of the Progressive Era

Intimate Exchanges: Work, Affect, and Exploitation in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth

The opposition between the world of work and the exchanges that constitute it, on the one hand, and that of intimacy and affect, on the other, has been a rich source of criticism on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth ever since its publication in 1905. Through a close rereading of the novel in terms of emotional labor, this essay argues that the novel is less concerned with questioning the confluence of work and intimacy in the late nineteenth century than with the problems arising from attempts to separate them. By thematizing the problem of compensation for work that is meant to resemble leisure, The House of Mirth is read here as a story of the exploitation that results from refusing to recognize emotional labor as work. While calculation and intimacy are inextricably joined by economic necessity in the figure of Lily Bart, it is ultimately not the commodification of intimacy that destroys her, but the compulsive search for “the real Lily Bart” that her circle of friends engage in

Team Fieldwork

Papers. Missing pages 233-234