Fantasies of the new class: Ideologies of Professionalism In Post

3. The term new class is a subject of much debate among sociologists and is often used interchangeably with the terms professional-managerial class and new middle classes. There is much confusion about whether this group constitutes an actual class in any meaningful sense and, if so, how to draw its boundaries; depending on the writer, each of these terms encompasses everything from routine white-collar workers to upper-level managers. This book uses the term new class in a broad sense to designate a variegated stratum of professionals dependent on educationally acquired cultural capital. John Frow helpfully glosses the vast literature on the new class in Cultural Studies and Cultural Capital (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1995), 89–130, as does Alan Liu in The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of lnformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 31–35. Some of the major post–World War II works on the new class include Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959); Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” in Between Labour and Capital, ed. Pat Walker, 5–45 (Hassocks, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1979); John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 2d. rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971); Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era (New York: Seabury Press, 1979); and Erik Olin Wright, Class Structure and Income Determination (New York: Academic, 1979), and Classes (London: Verso, 1985). The term new class itself originated in the work of early-twentieth-century Soviet dissidents such as Waclaw Machajski and Nicolai Bukharin, who used the concept to characterize the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic elite. See Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Praeger, 1957), which first introduced Soviet new-class theory to an American audience.

4. According to the U.S. Census, the percentage of Americans working in “professional and technical” occupations has been rising steadily since World War II, from 6.37 percent of the employed workforce in 1940 to 11.35 percent in 1960 to 16.06 percent in 1980 to 20.20 percent in 2000. These numbers may be somewhat misleading; it is unclear whether the Census Bureau used the terms professional and technical to refer to the same range of occupations over the course of the various decennial censuses. For instance, the 1940 census distinguishes between professional and semiprofessional vocations, whereas the others do not. The 1940 data are taken from Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, “Census Data for the Year 1940,” available at http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/censusbin/census/cen.pl?year=940. The rest of the data is taken from the U. S. Census Bureau’s Web site. See U.S. Census Bureau, “No. 673: Occupation of Employed Workers, by Sex, 1960 to 1980,” in 1981 Statistical Abstract, available at http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1981–07.pdf; and U.S. Census Bureau, “QT-P27: Occupation by Sex,” in Census 2000 Summary File 3, Matrix P50, available at http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=0100US&-qr_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U_QTP27&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U&-redoLog=false.

5. For a recent account of middle-class reformism within the U.S. left-liberal tradition, see Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). See also Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. (New York: Knopf, 1955); and Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), for two classic studies of Progressive Era politics. See Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), for an account of the various strands of managerial ideology during the New Deal. In The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986), Edwin Layton highlights the existence of technocratic professionalism among early-twentieth-century engineers, an ideology that sometimes led to conflict with their corporate employers.

6. Steven Brint, In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 2.

7. Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 2.

8. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950; reprint, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), xii.

10. Trilling also wrote an unfinished second novel, recently edited by Geraldine Murphy under the title The Journey Abandoned (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). In many ways, this novel offers a more complex exploration of American intellectuals than any of Trilling’s other criticism or fiction. In particular, The Journey Abandoned explores literary intellectuals’ anxious relationship with the moneyed bourgeoisie in a society in which, as one of the novel’s businessmen puts it, “even spiritual values are for sale, like everything else” (112).

11. Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947; reprint, New York: New York Review of Books, 2002), 31, 52, 19.

12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 76, 62.

13. Trilling, Middle of the Journey, 31, 162.

14. Donald Pease outlined this reading of cold war literary culture in Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), which argues that the postwar critics who established the Americanist canon (F. O. Mathiessen, Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, and so on) read classic nineteenth-century literature through the lens of their era’s binary opposition between collectivism and individual freedom. They therefore ignored an important dimension of the American Renaissance—U. S. writers’ search for a postrevolutionary public culture that could overcome the purely negative freedom celebrated by cold war critics. Pease established a critical narrative whereby postwar intellectuals discredited the organizational and collectivist politics of the 1930s in order to reclaim an ostensibly benighted individualism. The impact of this narrative is evident in many subsequent accounts of the postwar period, which focus on popular and intellectual anxieties about individuals being absorbed into collectivist entities—in particular the bureaucratic organizations described in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950; reprint, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956). In Timothy Melley’s terms, the period was marked by a discourse of “agency panic” that opposed an “all-or-nothing conception of agency” against a “monolithic conception of ‘society’ (or ‘system,’ or ‘organization’)” (The Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000], 10).

15. Trilling complicated this view in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (1965; reprint, London: Secker & Warburg, 1966), which I discuss in greater detail in chapter 4. He argued that the negative capability that he described in his early criticism had itself rigidified into a new orthodoxy among the educated middle class—in part through the efforts of literary intellectuals such as himself.

16. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, edited by Samuel Lipman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 5, 73, italics in original.

17. Brick makes Parsons the central, post–World War II figure of the postcapitalist tradition that he explores in Transcending Capitalism.

18. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909; reprint, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1963).

19. In his review of The Lonely Crowd, Trilling argued that Riesman explored American “morals and manners” in a fashion that put most contemporary novelists to shame. The last effective social novel was Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt; since then, Trilling stated, “few novelists have added anything new to our knowledge of American life. But the sociologists have, and Mr. Reisman [sic], writing with a sense of social actuality which Scott Fitzgerald might have envied, does literature a service by suggesting to the novelists that there are new and wonderfully arable social fields for them to till” (A Gathering of Fugitives [1956; reprint, London: Secker & Warburg, 1957], 86).

20. Trilling, Middle of the Journey, 348.

21. Trilling, Liberal Imagination, 219.

22. Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 13.

23. See Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), for an account of the Chicago School of Sociology’s impact on literary naturalism in the 1930s.

24. Trilling, Liberal Imagination, 1–2.

26. As Catherine Gallagher notes, this position became the consensus understanding of literature for a broad variety of critical paradigms that emerged after World War II: “one can find no more generally agreed-upon proposition in all sectors of literary criticism than the proposition that literature shakes us up and disturbs our moral equilibrium (liberal humanism), destabilizes the subject (deconstruction), and self-distantiates ideological formations (Marxism)” (“Marxism and the New Historicism,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser [New York: Routledge, 1989], 45).

27. Russell Reising remarks on post–World War II literary critics’ abandonment of sociological determinism. Postwar critics opposed “crudely materialistic notions of reality, but they did so by swinging to the opposite extreme and defining the life of the mind as the very stuff of reality” (The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature [New York: Methuen, 1986], 55).

28. In a typically hyperbolic statement from The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York: Penguin, 1994), published in 1968, Norman Mailer castigates the “liberal academic intelligentsia” for their role in establishing the technocratic welfare state: “Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist” (15).

29. Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 3.

30. C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, edited by Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 607. As Irving Horowitz documents in his biography of Mills, this critique of Trilling led to an angry exchange of letters between the two Columbia University professors (C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian [New York: Free Press, 1983], 84–89).

31. Mills’s most extensive critique of Parsons can be found in The Sociological Imagination (1959; reprint, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000).

33. C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (1948; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1951), and The Power Elite (London: Oxford University Press, 1956).

34. C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three (1958; reprint, London: Secker & Warburg, 1959).

35. Mills, Power, Politics, and People, 406.

36. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 16.

37. Mills, Power, Politics, and People, 226.

38. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 181.

39. The distinctiveness of Mills’s sociology on this point can be seen by comparing The Sociological Imagination to Robert Lynd’s Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1939). Lynd’s book, written from a progressive liberal perspective, assesses how social science might be restructured so as to play a leading role in welfare-state reform. Like Mills, Lynd criticizes the bureaucratic and narrowly disciplinary tendencies of social scientific research. Unlike Mills, he assumes that the purpose of this research is to be of use within government: “There is no way in which our culture can grow in continual serviceability to its people without a large and pervasive extension of planning and control to many areas now left to casual individual initiative.… It should be a major concern of social science to discover where and how such large-scale planning and control need to be extended throughout the culture so as to facilitate the human ends of living” (209).

40. See “Mass Society and Liberal Education” in Mills, Power, Politics, and People, 353–73.

41. Mills, Power, Politics, and People, 605.

43. Kevin Mattson emphasizes Mills’s ties to the liberal tradition. Mills, he argues, “performed an ‘in-house’ or friendly critique of liberals, one that pushed them on their self-professed ideals” (Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945–1970 [University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002], 67).

44. Robert Seguin, Around Quitting Time: Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 126.

45. Ann Douglas, in particular, articulates the harsh reassessment of the New York intellectuals made by many contemporary critics: “Who have the New York intellectuals converted lately? To what? A significant portion of what they wrote, particularly in the post–WWII years, has, in Hemingway’s phrase, ‘gone bad,’ rancid with self-important evasion” (“The Failure of the New York Intellectuals,” Raritan 17, no. 4 [Spring 1998], 6).

46. Terry Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 38–119.

47. William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Problems and Perspectives in Revolutionary Literature,” Partisan Review 1, no. 3 (June–July 1934), 5.

48. As Alan Wald argues, Philips and Rahv were part of a broader movement of American and European Marxist intellectuals who challenged the strict economic determinism of the Second and Third International. In America, this movement included theorists such as Max Eastman and Sidney Hook; in Europe, its most famous proponent was Georg Lukács (The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987], 124–25).

49. William Phillips (a.k.a. “Wallace Phelps”) articulated this argument in “Three Generations,” Partisan Review 1, no. 4 (September–October 1934): 49–55. This notion of a formally experimental radical art influenced many 1930s writers, notably James Farrell, who had close ties with the Partisan Review in its early years.

50. Phillips and Rahv, “Problems and Perspectives,” 5, italics in original.

51. In The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1995), Hugh Wilford argues that most of the New York intellectuals conceived of themselves as a Marxist–Leninist intellectual vanguard long after their break from any form of party politics. In effect, they shifted their class allegiances, viewing themselves as the vanguard of the educated middle class rather than of the proletariat.

52. William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Literature in a Political Decade,” in New Letters in America, ed. Horace Gregory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), 176, 177.

53. Saul Bellow, Conversations with Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria Cronin and Ben Siegel (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), 94.

54. Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Louis Menand, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), and White Collar Fictions: Class and Social Representation in American Literature, 1885–1925 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).

55. McGurl, The Novel Art, 11, italics in original.

57. Andrew Hoberek, The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post–World War II American Fiction and White Collar Work (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 21.

58. Philip Rahv, “Our Country and Our Culture,” Partisan Review 19, no. 3 (May 1952), 306.

59. Edward Brunner describes a similar shift in post–World War II poetics. The absorption of poets into the academy led them to cultivate a “populist formalism” designed to appeal to an expanded, educated middle-class audience: “Formal poetry lent itself to presentation as an array of professional devices each of which was designed to foster communication. The packaging of formalist devices openly displayed the poem as labor-intensive, an exquisitely balanced verbal machine crafted by specialists in the language arts” (Cold War Poetry [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001], 6).

60. Hoberek, Twilight of the Middle Class, 89.

61. James Farrell, Studs Lonigan: Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, Judgment Day (New York: Avon Books, 1977), 388–89.

63. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (New York: Penguin, 1953), 43.

64. Donald Pizer, Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 134.

65. Bellow, Adventures of Augie March, 117, italics in original.

67. Sean McCann, writing about this passage, similarly remarks on Bellow’s cultural determinism: “Bellow’s novel dramatizes a simultaneous indulgence in and suspicion of rhetorical power, where the ability to invent and entice seems at once a valuable means to resist the rule of law and custom and, at the same time, a dangerous form of imperial overreach” (A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008], 105).

68. Bellow, Adventures of Augie March, 454.

69. According to Janis Bellow’s memoir, Bellow claimed that in Louis Wirth’s courses, he encountered his “first highly cultivated German Jew, who pronounced each exquisite syllable of every difficult word” (“Saul Bellow,” in An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago, ed. Molly Mc-Quade, 1–12 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 2–3).

70. See James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000), 476–78, for an account of Bellow’s friendship with Shils. Shils also helped edit the manuscript of Bellow’s 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet, discussed in chapter 4.

71. Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future, a Non-fiction Collection (New York: Viking, 1994), 96.

73. Gouldner, Future of Intellectuals, 48, 29.

75. Hoberek similarly remarks on the datedness of celebratory theories about the new class: “The postwar middle class did well, but the fate of the middle class since the seventies suggests that this had more to do with the postwar boom and the redistributive polices of the mid-century welfare state than with the inherent nature of the postwar economy” (Twilight of the Middle Class, 6).

76. Brint, In an Age of Experts, 15.

77. As Christopher Newfield documents, this shift was necessitated by the 1970s recession, which decreased government funding for public institutions. More broadly, it was necessitated by the accelerated globalization of the world economy, which weakened the bond between the academy and the nation-state. This transformation of the university was reflected in changes to U. S. patent law, such as the Bayh–Dole Act (1982), which made it increasingly easy for university researchers to patent the results their work and sell them directly to the private sector. As a result, “it became harder to image how the university could serve society without serving the corporate sector to which society apparently owed its wealth, knowledge, and way of life” (Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980 [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003], 177, italics in original).

78. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 103.

79. Bourdieu’s sociology of intellectuals is a pervasive feature of his work, but see especially Homo Academicus (trans. Peter Collier [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988]), his study of the French academic field.

1. Terry Eagleton comments on some of the affinities between the New Criticism and structural functionalism, albeit in very different terms than I do here: “The literary text, for American New Criticism as for I. A. Richards, was therefore grasped in what might be called ‘functionalist’ terms; just as American functionalist sociology developed a ‘conflict-free’ model of society, in which every element ‘adapted’ to every other, so the poem abolished all friction, irregularity and contradiction in the symmetrical cooperation of its various features” (Literary Theory: An Introduction [Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1983], 47).

2. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 168, italics in original.

3. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 173.

4. Geoffrey Hawthorn remarks on structural functionalism’s impact on sociology: “in exactly the way in which the instruments of survey analysis served to constitute a professional technique, functionalism served to constitute a professional value. This was most apparent in introductory textbooks and on those occasions when the profession explained itself to the laity” (Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Sociology [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976], 214).

5. John Guillory, “The Sokal Hoax and the History of Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002), 498.

6. Allan Tate, “The Present Function of Criticism,” Southern Review 6 (1940–1941), 240.

7. Included in John Crowe Ransom, Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom, ed. Thomas Daniel Young and John Hindle, 93–106 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984).

8. Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “Professional-Managerial Class,” in Between Labour and Capital, ed. Pat Walker (Hassocks, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1979), 27.

9. Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 199.

10. James Farrell, Studs Lonigan: Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, Judgment Day (New York: Avon Books, 1977), 429.

11. See Henrika Kuklick, “A ‘Scientific Revolution’: Sociological Theory in the United States, 1930–1945,” Sociological Inquiry 43, no. 1 (1973): 3–22, for a detailed account of how this backlash unfolded in the 1930s and 1940s.

12. According to Albert Biderman and Elizabeth Crawford, the total number of social scientists engaged in government work was about 680 in 1931. Most of them were economists. The figure rose to 2,150 over the next six years as New Deal programs were implemented (The Political Economics of Social Research: The Case of Sociology [Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Social Science Research, 1968], 41). Industrial sociology began with the Hawthorne experiments, which were conducted by Harvard researchers and extended from the late 1920s through the mid-1930s. The management innovations that came from these experiments became common practice during and after World War II. For more on the emergence of industrial sociology, see Loren Baritz, Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1960).

13. For an account of the formation of the Harvard Department of Social Relations, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 76–79.

14. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951). For an empirical account of the influence of structural functionalism in the 1950s and 1960s, see Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Carll Ladd Jr., “Politics of American Sociologists,” American Journal of Sociology 78 (1972): 67–104. These researchers review surveys of the frequency with which authors are cited in the literature of sociology, which show that Parsons and his student Robert Merton are the two most referenced figures. See also George Huaco, “Ideology and General Theory: The Case of Sociological Functionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (1996): 34–54. Even in the 1950s, sociology was a diverse discipline; many quantitative sociologists remained untouched by Parsonian functionalism. In addition, popular sociologists such as David Riesman, Daniel Bell, and C. Wright Mills did not rely on a Parsonian framework.

15. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (1937; reprint, New York: Free Press, 1968).

16. Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924).

17. Parsons, Structure of Social Action, 6.

18. Parsons quoted in C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959; reprint, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39. Mills’s book initiated the backlash in sociology against Parsons’s work that culminated in Alvin Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic, 1970), essentially a book-length critique of Parsons.

19. Parsons, Structure of Social Action, 424.

20. Gouldner, commenting on this aspect of Parsons’s work, notes that “Talcott Parsons’s vast oeuvre can best be understood as a complex ideology of the New Class, expressed by and through his flattering conception of professionalism” (The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era [New York: Seabury Press, 1979], 37, italics in original).

21. Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 131. For a more extensive account of Parsons’s reformism in the 1930s, see also Howard Brick, “The Reformist Dimension of Talcott Parsons’s Early Social Theory,” in The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, ed. Thomas Haskell and Richard Teichgraeber III, 357–96 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

22. Brick, Transcending Capitalism, 144.

23. Durkheim first introduced the idea that professional associations and other corporative organizations can play many of the same functions as families and other premodern institutions in his 1902 preface to the second edition of The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1933).

24. See Parsons, The Social System, 428–79.

25. Talcott Parsons, The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 105.

27. Jamie Cohen-Cole describes how a broad swath of post–World War II intellectuals similarly viewed the academy as a potential model for U.S. society as a whole. Referring to the Macy conferences on cybernetics, which involved Margaret Mead, Marshall McLuhan, Gregory Bateson, and many others, Cohen-Cole notes, “[H]umanists and physical scientists joined social scientists in using academic culture to think about national and international issues. At the center of their diagnosis of society’s ills and of the cure was a casual treatment of the social world of the academy as a microcosm of, and ideal type for, American society” (“The Creative American: Cold War Salons, Social Science, and the Cure for Modern Society,” Isis 100 [2009], 248).

28. Graff, Professing Literature, 148.

29. Both John Fekete (The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan [London: Routledge, 1977]) and Terry Eagleton (Literary Theory) emphasize the discontinuities between the Agrarians and New Critics, arguing that the New Critics dropped their socioeconomic critique of northern industrialism with their transition into the academy. Other critics who echo Graff and Guillory and highlight the continuities between agrarianism and the New Criticism include Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Paul A. Bové, Mastering Discourse: The Politics of Intellectual Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992); and Karen O’Kane, “Before the New Criticism: Modernism and the Nashville Group,” Mississippi Quarterly 51, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 683–97.

30. Two excellent accounts of the Fugitives’ evolution into Agrarians and subsequently into New Critics are John Stewart, The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and the Agrarians (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), and Thomas Daniel Young, Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976). The three groups do not overlap exactly. Brooks, for instance, was an Agrarian and New Critic but never a Fugitive. In contrast, Donald Davidson was a Fugitive and Agrarian but never a New Critic.

31. The Agrarians’ attitude toward race relations was predictable for conservative southern intellectuals of their era. They nostalgically recollected the plantation economy of the Old South and in so doing elided the problem of slavery and race discrimination; “slavery,” Ransom argues in one of his contributions to the Agrarian essay collection I’ll Take My Stand, “was a feature monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice” (“Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners [John Crowe Ransom and others] [1930; reprint, New York: Harper, 1962], 14). Other contributors, such as Frank Lawrence Owsley (“Irrepressible Conflict,” 61–91) and Robert Penn Warren (“Briar Patch,” 246–64), offered qualified defenses of the South’s post–Civil War rejection of black suffrage.

32. John Crowe Ransom, God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (1930; reprint, Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1965), 59.

33. Ransom developed this argument in “A Poem Nearly Anonymous” (1933), later reprinted as “Forms and Citizens” in Selected Essays, 59–73.

34. In Ransom, Selected Essays, 46.

35. Ransom, “Statement of Principles,” in I’ll Take My Stand, xliv. This introduction is by Ransom alone, although it is not attributed to him in the text (Young, Gentleman in a Dustcoat, 208–10).

36. In Ransom, Selected Essays, 57.

37. Although the Agrarians were hostile toward the New Deal, their nostalgic regionalism was not entirely at odds with the conception of culture developed by many federalist intellectuals associated with the Roosevelt administration. In particular, Ransom’s regionalism prefigured the underlying philosophy that guided the most ambitious government foray into U.S. literary culture: the Federal Writers’ Project. As Jerrold Hirsch details, the intellectuals and bureaucrats who administrated the project embraced a pluralist vision of the United States that emphasized the particularity of regional cultures. Many writers involved in the American Guide series articulated an organicist perspective that echoed the Agrarians’ essays on southern culture. The Louisiana guidebook, published in 1941, describes how the region’s buildings “evolved out of the material on hand, the exigencies of the climate, and the needs of the colonists” (cited in Jerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003], 72).

38. In Ransom, Selected Essays, 57.

39. The buildings constructed in the 1920s and 1930s were initially designed by the noted landscape architect company Olmsted Brothers, which also designed the campus layout for Stanford University in 1888. Another architect, Theodore Link, scrapped parts of their original plans to design Louisiana State University’s well-known quadrangle.

40. John Crowe Ransom, Selected Letters of John Crowe Ransom, ed. Thomas Daniel Young and George Core (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 217.

41. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each, ed. John Barrell (London: Dent, 1972), 36.

42. Ransom, Selected Letters, 219.

44. In Ransom, Selected Essays, 94.

47. Ibid., 189, italics in original.

48. Cleanth Brooks also expressed this anxiety about disciplinary boundaries in The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, 1947). If the proponents of the humanities “are to be merely cultural historians, they must not be surprised if they are quietly relegated to a comparatively obscure corner of the history division. If one man’s taste is really as good as another’s, and they can pretend to offer nothing more than a neutral and objective commentary on tastes, they must expect to be treated as sociologists, though perhaps not as a very important kind of sociologist” (235).

49. Ransom, Poems and Essays (New York: Vintage, 1955), 116–17.

51. Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays on the Teaching of English, ed. Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 44.

52. Donald Levine, Visions of the Sociological Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 289. For other accounts of the crisis in sociology, especially as related to the use of sociology in public policy, see the essays collected in Terence Halliday and Morris Janowitz, eds., Sociology and Its Publics: The Forms and Fates of Disciplinary Organization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

53. Guillory, Cultural Capital, 45.

1. The review was turned down for publication by the Antioch Review. It appeared twenty years later in Shadow and Act, which is reprinted in Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, 47–340 (New York: Modern Library, 2003). Subsequent citations to the Collected Essays are noted parenthetically in the text as CE. See also Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944; reprint, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).

2. Thomas Schaub details some of the affinities between Ellison’s postwar essays and the work of New York intellectuals such as Trilling: “In Ellison’s writing of this time, as in literary culture generally, one notes the characteristic rejection of naturalism and social realism as adequate forms of representation, and a redefinition of personal identity and social history as tragic, complex, ambivalent, and ironic” (American Fiction in the Cold War [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991], 91).

3. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1995). All page references are to the 1995 Vintage edition and are hereafter noted parenthetically in the text as IM.

4. Kenneth Warren, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 63. Other studies that address Ellison’s critique of damage theory include Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Watts focuses exclusively on Ellison’s nonfiction and, like Warren, identifies moments when Ellison qualifies his opposition to sociological determinism. Ferguson explores Ellison’s incorporation of his antisociological argument into a deleted chapter from Invisible Man. Scott discusses Ellison’s review of Myrdal in the context of the Daniel P. Moynihan controversy of the mid-1960s (see note 16).

5. Andrew Hoberek, The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post–World War II American Fiction and White Collar Work (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 55.

6. Myrdal, American Dilemma, lxix.

7. Michel Fabre, “From Native Son to Invisible Man: Some Notes on Ralph Ellison’s Evolution in the 1950s,” in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, ed. Kimberly Benston (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987), 206.

8. Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; reprint, New York: Perennial Classics, 1998) and Black Boy (1945; reprint, New York: Harper Perennial, 2007). As discussed in chapter 1, Wright had close connections with the Chicago School of Sociology; indeed, he wrote the introduction to St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1945), ^a landmark study of Chicago’s South Side. For more on this connection, see Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 182–210, and Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 99–132.

9. Warren, So Black and Blue, 70. In Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), Stanley Elkins compares the psychological effects of slavery on African Americans to the effects of concentration camps on Holocaust survivors.

10. Barbara Foley, “Ralph Ellison as Proletarian Journalist,” Science and Society 62, no. 4 (Winter 1998–1999), 539.

11. Herbert Aptheker, The Negro People in America: A Critique of Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma” (New York: International, 1946).

12. There are two excellent studies of An American Dilemma that provide extensive background information on the project: Walter Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and David Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black–White Relations: The Use and Abuse of “An American Dilemma,” 1944–1969 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

13. This was the position articulated by many of the black Marxists who helped prepare the research for Myrdal’s work, such as Ralph Bunche, the militant head of political science at Howard University. Bunche’s conclusion in his memorandum on black political organization for the project was that the best strategy for American blacks was to forge alliances with the white working class, thus creating an interracial proletariat: “If there is an ideology which offers any hope to the Negro… it would seem to be that which identifies his interests with the white workers of the nation.” For him, the African American’s “future status here will largely depend upon the political and economic course of the nation. This will prove even more vital to the Negro than his ability to ‘develop’ himself and to change white attitudes toward him” (cited in Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 127, 129).

14. Myrdal, American Dilemma, 75.

15. Ibid., 928, 929, italics in original.

16. Prior to Myrdal’s study, from the 1920s to the 1940s, most enlightened U.S. sociologists were involved in polemics against biological theories of black racial inferiority. Influenced by cultural anthropologists such as Franz Boas and by the urban sociologists of the Chicago School of Sociology, they instead focused on the determining effects of race prejudice and economic deprivation on black populations. For more on the transition in U.S. social science from biological racism to social determinism, see James McKee, Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure of a Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). This sociological argument extended into the 1960s, long after the extinction of biological racism as a viable scientific theory. It culminated in Daniel P. Moynihan’s notorious government report The Negro Family (1965), which argued that female-centered black families were a historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. The text of The Negro Family, along with other documents pertaining to the controversy it aroused, can be found in Lee Rainwater and William Yancey, eds., The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy: A Trans-action Social Science and Public Policy Report (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967).

17. Myrdal, American Dilemma, lxix.

18. As Doug Rossinow notes, this educational approach to combating racism was broadly influential among liberal antiracists in the late 1940s. It helped propel the “human relations” movement, which set for government “the task of reforming negative ‘attitudes’ among the populace” (Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008], 178).

19. Myrdal, American Dilemma, 1029, italics in original.

20. This is only one of several occasions in which Ellison paraphrased Myrdal’s dilemma thesis. Other occasions include “Beating That Boy” (CE, 148), “The Shadow and the Act” (CE, 304), and “Tell it Like It Is, Baby” (CE, 31).

21. Howard Zinn, The Southern Mystique (New York: Knopf, 1964).

22. William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (1907; reprint, New York: Dover, 1959), 5.

23. Ralph Ellison, Flying Home and Other Stories, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 143, 145.

24. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, 1947), 195.

25. For the Black Arts movement’s response to Ellison, see the essays collected in Black World 20 (December 1970).

26. Irving Howe, for instance, complained about “the sudden, unprepared and implausible assertion of unconditioned freedom with which [Invisible Man] ends,” which “breaks the coherence of the novel and reveals Ellison’s dependence on the post-war Zeitgeist” (A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics [New York: Horizon Press, 1963], 115).

27. Myrdal, American Dilemma, 1030.

28. “Legislators now take it for granted that teachers and social workers ought to have a college degree; a college education should be even more urgently required for fulfilling the duties of a police officer.… Ideally the policeman should he something of an educator and a social worker at the same time that he is the arm of the law” (Myrdal, American Dilemma, 544–45, italics in original).

30. Hoberek, Twilight of the Middle Class, 55.

31. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1951), xvii; see also David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950; reprint, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).

32. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), 162.

33. Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, The Theory of Psychoanalysis: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id, and Other Works, ed. Angela Richards (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 374, italics in original.

34. Frazier documents the evolution of black colleges in Black Bourgeoisie (60–85). See also Raymond Wolters, The New Negro on Campus: Black College Rebellions of the 1920s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), for an account of black student rebellions against the missionary model in the 1920s.

35. As Roderick Ferguson notes, this disciplinary effort was embodied in black colleges’ architecture and geographical location: “As ‘the cultural products of a recently emancipated people,’ HBCUs [historically black colleges and universities] attempted to mimic the canonical features of modern architecture and claim its ideals of normativity and humanity, but the racial specificity of African American oppression disrupted efforts to display canonical and normative status through architecture. For instance, instead of being located within the heart of rural towns, southern HBCUs were often built on marginalized property and could only be accessed through backways that were distant from main streets” (Aberrations in Black, 60).

36. Hoberek, Twilight of the Middle Class, 57.

37. Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), 139.

38. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 56.

39. As Lawrence Jackson argues, the invisible man evolves from black square into literary hipster over the course of the novel: “By the novel’s own chronology, during the Prologue, the Invisible Man has evolved into a sharpie, a reefer-smoking theoretician walking down the street with a knife, attacking whites over petty insults” (“Ralph Ellison, Sharpies, Rinehart, and Politics in Invisible Man,” Massachusetts Review 49 [Spring 1999], 81).

40. Ann Douglas provides an excellent account of these divisions within the Harlem Renaissance in Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 82–84.

41. Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, ed. Deborah E. McDowell (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986).

42. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

43. Houston A. Baker Jr., Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 193.

1. Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 178–79.

2. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972).

3. Mary McCarthy, Birds of America (1971; reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992); all page references are to the 1992 edition and hereafter are noted parenthetically in the text.

4. All these works are collected in Mary McCarthy, The Seventeenth Degree: How It Went, Vietnam, Hanoi, Medina, and Sons of the Morning (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).

5. Cited in Mary McCarthy, Conversations with Mary McCarthy, ed. Carol Gelderman (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991), 304.

6. David Laskin, Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 19, italics in original.

7. Harvey Teres, Renewing the Left: Politics, Imagination, and the New York Intellectuals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 15.

8. Apart from Trilling’s “‘Elements That Are Wanted,’” Partisan Review 7, no. 5 (September–October 1940): 367–79, two other Partisan Review essays that place T. S. Eliot’s cultural politics in conversation with Marxism are William Phillips and Philip Rahv, “Criticism,” Partisan Review 2, no. 7 (April–May 1935): 16–25, and Philip Rahv, “A Season in Heaven,” Partisan Review 3 (June 1936): 11–14. All of the New York intellectuals were also influenced by Edmund Wilson’s assessment of Eliot in Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931; reprint, London: Fontana, 1984). This influence was particularly obvious in McCarthy’s case; she and Wilson endured a notoriously stormy marriage in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

9. Trilling, “‘Elements That Are Wanted,’” 376.

11. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Postwar Intellectual (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 91.

12. Mary McCarthy, The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), 204.

13. McCarthy, Conversations, 115.

14. See in particular Gary Snyder’s celebration of the tribal as opposed to the civilized in Earth House Hold: Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (New York: New Directions, 1969).

15. Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 4. Nils Gilman provides a similar intellectual history of modernization theory in Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

16. Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), 77. As we saw in chapter 2, something like this dichotomy was at the root of Gunnar Myrdal’s distinction between lower and higher value systems, which he used to distinguish between the American Creed and premodern, racist prejudices. Parsons’s ideal-type distinction between traditional and modern societies was more complex than Myrdal’s. The opposition between particularism and universalism was the first of five “pattern variables”—paired sets of terms that Parsons used to classify societies. The other four pattern variables were “ascription” versus “achievement-orientation,” “role diffusion” versus “role specificity,” “orientation to the collective” versus “orientation to the self,” and “nonaffective relationships” versus “affective relationships.”

17. Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 19–20.

18. The two most influential works setting forth this thesis were Eugene Staley, The Future of Underdeveloped Countries: Political Implications of Economic Development, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961); and Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Both writers were involved in the Kennedy administration.

19. Cited in Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 178.

20. Cited in ibid., 151.

21. McCarthy, Seventeenth Degree, 138.

23. Ibid., 307, italics in original.

24. Cited in Abrams, Mary McCarthy, 85.

25. McCarthy, Seventeenth Degree, 293.

27. McCarthy may have loosely based this character on Edward Shils, with whom she sparred during a panel at the 1960 Congress for Cultural Freedom conference in Warsaw, Poland. Shils was well known for his defense of mass culture and had a profound impact on the modernization theorists who worked within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. At the panel, entitled “Modernity and Tradition,” McCarthy accused Shils of being “Dr. Pangloss reborn and without Dr. Pangloss’ charm and innocence” (Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, 83), the same epithet that Peter attaches to Dr. Small in the novel.

28. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 487.

29. This food purism is not as idiosyncratic an obsession as it may at first seem to be; when Birds of America was published in the early 1970s, the health foods movement was just beginning, and it embodied much of Rosamund’s culinary philosophy. Alice Waters, for instance, opened Chez Panisse at Berkeley in 1971; she similarly emphasized the use of fresh, local ingredients and highlighted the detrimental environmental and health effects of eating mass-produced foods.

30. McCarthy, Seventeenth Degree, 309–10, italics added.

31. Rosamund’s own family also exemplifies the cultural heterogeneity she cannot expunge from her kitchen. Two of her husbands are émigré Jews, and her half-Jewish son is living evidence of this mongrelization of the American stock. Moreover, Rosamund’s multiple husbands and nonconventional career as a musician and scholar demonstrate that she is in conflict with the feminine traditions for which she feels nostalgia.

32. Carol Brightman similarly glosses this passage in her biography of McCarthy: “It is only a matter of time before our faith in nature, McCarthy suggests, like our original belief in God, goes, too” (Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992], 530, italics in original).

33. Mary McCarthy, Ideas and the Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 116.

35. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950; reprint, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), xii. McCarthy’s insistence that literature sacrifices the conceptual clarity of ideological discourse in order to “save the particulars at all costs” also brings her close to the New Critics; she echoes John Crowe Ransom’s emphasis in The World’s Body (1938; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968) on the “texture” of literary style, which supposedly imitates the phenomenal complexity of the natural world.

36. In Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), 265.

38. McCarthy, Ideas and the Novel, 4.

39. Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, 174.

40. McCarthy, On the Contrary, 274.

1. Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Viking Press, 1970); all page references are to the 1970 edition and are hereafter noted parenthetically in the text.

2. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950; reprint, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), xii.

3. Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (1965; reprint, London: Secker & Warburg, 1966), xiii, 215.

4. For more detailed accounts of the neoconservative movement by sympathetic historians and political theorists, see John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995); Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1996). For critical accounts, see Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); and Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). Barbara Ehrenreich also has an excellent chapter on the neoconservatives in Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). The neoconservative theory of the new class is scattered throughout the neoconservatives’ works. A representative collection of essays on the topic, mostly by neoconservatives, can be found in Barry Bruce-Briggs, ed., The New Class? (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1979).

5. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, 145.

6. Included in Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 145.

9. Bellow’s affinities with the neoconservative movement are well known, although no critic of his work has discussed them in depth. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he gave interviews that echoed the movement’s views on the 1960s counterculture, race relations, foreign policy, and other topics. He also joined one major neoconservative organization—the Committee for the Free World, founded in 1981 to advance “the struggle for freedom” (James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography [New York: Random House, 2000], 513). For many contemporary readers, Mr. Sammler’s Planet was the novel that marked Bellow’s affinity with the emerging movement; Richard Poirier referred to it and its predecessor, Herzog (New York: Viking Press, 1964), as efforts “to test out, to substantiate, to vitalize, and ultimately to propagate a kind of cultural conservatism” (“Herzog, or Bellow in Trouble,” in Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Earl Rovit [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975], 81). Bellow himself, however, never embraced the neoconservative label; as late as 1994, he still proclaimed himself a liberal, although simultaneously distancing himself from liberal opinions and attitudes: “I consider myself some sort of liberal, but I don’t like where liberalism has gone in this country in the last twenty years.… It’s become mindless—medallion-wearing and placard-bearing. I have very little use for it. It’s a cover also for a great deal of resentment and hatred, these terrible outbursts from people whose principles are affronted when you disagree with them” (Saul Bellow, Conversations with Saul Bellow, ed. Gloria Cronin and Ben Siegel [Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994], 294).

10. Assessments of the novel’s racial politics are given in Emily Miller Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Ethan Goffman, “Between Guilt and Affluence: The Jewish Gaze and the Black Thief in Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” Contemporary Literature 38, no. 4 (1997): 705–25; L. H. Goldman, Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience (New York: Irvington, 1983); and Mariann Russell, “White Man’s Black Man: Three Views,” CLA Journal 17 (1973): 93–100. In 2001, the Saul Bellow Journal also devoted a double issue to Bellow’s treatment of race throughout his work. Gloria Cronin offers the most thorough account of Bellow’s sexual politics in A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001). which includes a chapter on Mr. Sammler’s Planet.

11. Saul Bellow, “Foreword,” in The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, by Harold Bloom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 18, 17.

12. Andrew Hoberek similarly describes Bellow as both “the first fiction writer of his stature to make his living within the academy and a bitter, life-long critic of the university” (The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post–World War II American Fiction and White Collar Work [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005], 18, italics in original). For an overview of Bellow’s comments on the university, see Ben Siegel, “Saul Bellow and the University as Villain,” in Saul Bellow in the 1980s: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Gloria Cronin and L. H. Goldman, 137–59 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989).

13. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1969–1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).

14. Norman Podhoretz described this imagined affinity between welfare-state liberals and the student movement as a political conspiracy: “The New Class was using its own young people as commandos, sending them out into the streets to clash with the enemy’s troops (the police and the National Guard) while the ‘elders’ directed the grand strategy from behind the lines and engaged in less dangerous forms of political warfare against the established power” (Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir [New York: Harper and Row, 1979], 288–89).

15. Commenting on the explicit antifeminism of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Cronin defends the novel as a “concerted study of misogyny and misogynists” and a “self-conscious ironic production” (A Room of His Own, 124, 134). Cronin correctly notes that Bellow should not be conflated with his elderly protagonist. However, the misogynistic reading of contemporary society that Sammler voices is a recurring feature of Bellow’s novels and nonfiction. Moreover, much of the novel’s irony, if it is indeed present, is qualified by the fact that Sammler is a Holocaust survivor—that is, a sympathetic victim and witness of history.

16. Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, ix.

17. Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).

18. Reprinted in Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 317.

19. In addition, throughout the 1980s many Jewish neoconservatives supported evangelical Protestant organizations because these organizations were staunch defenders of Israel. It did not matter that these Christians did so for theological reasons—that is, because they believed that the second coming of Christ was linked to the return of Jews to the Holy Land. Kristol observes, “The fact that the Moral Majority is pro-Israel for theological reasons that flow from Christian belief is hardly a reason for Jews to distance themselves from it. Why would it be a problem for us? It is their theology, but it is our Israel” (“Irving Kristol Writes,” Commentary 78, no. 4 [October 1984], 17).

20. Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative, 315.

21. George Weigel, for instance, noted of Kristol that he “has an instrumental view of religion here because he—as he would admit—is tone-deaf to religious sensibilities. This is not music that makes his heart sing. Yet he is smart enough an observer of the human condition to understand that he should not take a Kantian imperative here” (cited in Gerson, Neoconservative Vision, 284–85).

22. Alan Berger, Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 101.

23. Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an idea (New York: Free Press, 1995), 8.

24. This same contradiction marks Bellow’s critique of the sexual revolution as exemplary of the “private disorder and public bewilderment” that pervade contemporary culture (It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future, a Nonfiction Collection [New York: Viking, 1994], 92). He himself was a notorious philanderer, married five times and involved with multiple mistresses.

25. Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 4.

26. Bellow expressed his ambivalence toward Israel in his most extended work of literary journalism, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (New York: Viking Press, 1976). He supported Israel’s right to exist, especially against pro-Arab, leftist intellectuals. However, he was also dismayed at anti-Arab sentiment on the part of many Zionists and argued for the negotiated creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank.

27. Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986), 373.

28. Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, 86.

29. Ibid., 95, italics in original.

31. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1940; reprint, London: Unwin University Books, 1943), 146, 143.

32. Daniel Bell, “The New Class: A Muddled Concept,” in Briggs, ed., The New Class? 169, italics in original.

33. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 66.

34. Hoberek, Twilight of the Middle Class, 19.

35. Bell, “The New Class,” 189.

36. Like Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow’s novel More Die of Heartbreak (New York: William Morrow, 1987) also revolves around a homosocial relationship between a humanist and scientist. The humanist in this case is Benn’s nephew, Kenneth, a Russian literature specialist and the novel’s first-person narrator. Through this figure, Bellow explores the obsolescence of humanistic learning in 1980s America. Aesthetes such as Kenneth were “assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near” (247).

1. Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 70.

2. Tom Hayden, “The Politics of the Movement,” in The New Left: A Documentary History, ed. Massimo Teodori (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 207.

3. Mario Savio, “An End to History,” in Teodori, ed., The New Left, 159, 161.

4. George R. Vickers, The Formation of the New Left: The Early Years (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975), 124, italics in original.

5. Sean McCann and Michael Szalay, “Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking After the New Left,” Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 2 (2005), 454.

6. The community-development projects began in 1964 in the form of the Economic Research and Action Projects that SDS established in various lower-class urban neighborhoods. These initiatives provoked a debate within SDS between, on the one hand, activists such as Hayden who believed that SDS should move into the ghettos and organize the poor and, on the other hand, activists such as Al Haber who argued that the New Left was first and foremost a movement of professionals and intellectuals who should radicalize the middle-class workplace. Haber complained about Hayden’s “cult of the ghetto”: “Is radicalism subsisting in a slum for a year or two, or is it developing your individual talents so you can function as a radical in your ‘professional’ field and throughout your adult life?” (cited in James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994], 190). For an account of these projects’ community activism, see Miller, 184–217. For a discussion of the free-clinic movement, see Robert Castel, Françoise Castel, and Anne Lovell, The Psychiatric Society, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 214–55.

7. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Fawcett Books, 1976); and Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); all page references to these two books are to these editions and are hereafter given parenthetically in the text.

8. The other major works of new utopian science fiction from this period, frequently discussed alongside Piercy and Le Guin’s work, are Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975; reprint, Boston: Beacon Books, 1986) and Samuel Delany’s Triton (New York: Bantam Books, 1976).

9. Although much has been published on the politics of Woman on the Edge of Time and The Dispossessed, very little work has been done on how these texts reflect 1960s and 1970s debates about the new class. With regards to Le Guin, both Victor Urbanowicz, (“Personal and Political in The Dispossessed,” in Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. Harold Bloom, 145–54 [New York: Chelsea House, 1986]) and Laurence Davis (“The Dynamic and Revolutionary Utopia of Ursula K. Le Guin,” in The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed,” ed. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman, 3–36 [Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005]) touch on Le Guin’s appropriation of Paul Goodman’s theory of professionalism in the context of a broader discussion of her political anarchism. The best discussion of Piercy’s class politics can be found in Heather Hicks, “Striking Cyborgs: Reworking the ‘Human’ in Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It,” in Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, ed. Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, 85–106 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), an essay on Piercy’s later cyberpunk novel He, She, and It (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1991). Hicks argues that this novel’s exploration of the posthuman registers Piercy’s anxieties about the proletarianization of the white-collar workforce in the 1980s and 1990s.

10. Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 30–31.

11. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1887; reprint, New York: Random House, 1951).

12. Echoing James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (New York: John Day, 1941), Orwell imagines that the ruling group that established Oceania “was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians” (Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949; reprint, Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1954], 164).

13. Marge Piercy and Robert Gottlieb, “Movement for a Democratic Society: Beginning to Begin to Begin” (1968), in Teodori, ed., The New Left, 403–10. The most extensive New Left articulation of new working-class social theory was the “Port Authority Statement” (1967), by David Gilbert, Robert Gottlieb, and Gerry Tenney. The title of this unpublished document echoes the better-known “Port Huron Statement.” Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman elaborated on this theory a few years later in their retrospective account of the New Left, A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism (New York: Random House, 1971). See Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968: The Great Refusal (New York: J. F. Bergin, 1982), especially chapter 6, for an account of New Left debates about the new class.

14. Piercy and Gottlieb, “Movement for a Democratic Society,” 408.

15. Ibid., 407, 408.

16. Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Damn” (1969), in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Random House, 1970), 425–26, 432.

17. Hicks, “Striking Cyborgs,” 98.

18. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York: New American Library, 1962).

19. Maria Farland comments on the centrality of the asylum to feminist theory in the 1970s: “Many of the decade’s representations of women’s liberation came to be embedded under a surface narrative of women’s entrapment within totalizing, all-powerful institutions—‘every woman loves a fascist’—whose tentacles of power were believed to imprison and enslave women. Psychiatric institutions make frequent appearances in women’s writings of the period, with psychiatry viewed as a form of ‘social control over women’ emblematic of larger structures of control” (“Total System, Total Solution, Total Apocalypse: Sex Oppression, Systems of Property, and 1970s Women’s Liberation Fiction,” Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 2 [2005], 387). Robert Castel, Françoise Castel, and Anne Lovell more generally describe the prevalence of the asylum as a synecdoche for the welfare state within New Left social thought: “Mental institutions served as a kind of countermodel, exhibiting rigid hierarchy, authoritarian control, formalistic relationships between patients and staff, and an ideology of professionalism” (Psychiatric Society, 215).

20. The population of state mental hospitals in the United States declined from an all-time peak of 558,000 in 1955 to 193,000 in 1975 (Castel, Castel, and Lovell, Psychiatric Society, 79); the average period of hospitalization over the same period shrunk from twenty years to seven months (Steven Gillon, That’s Not What We Meant to Do: Reform and Its Unintended Consequences in Twentieth-Century America [New York: Norton, 2000], 97). New York was no exception to this trend; its patient population dropped from 93,000 in 1956 to 39,000 in 1974 (Castel, Castel, and Lovell, Psychiatric Society, 93).

21. Maria Farland, “Sylvia Plath’s Anti-psychiatry,” Minnesota Review 55–57 (2000–2001), 246.

22. See also Peter Sedgwick, Psychopolitics (London: Pluto Press, 1982), for a critique of conservative undercurrents in the antipsychiatry movement.

23. The Community Action Programs got under way in the early 1960s with various experimental pilot projects funded by the Ford Foundation and the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. They later became a central component of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which declared that all Community Action Programs, in order to be eligible for federal funding, had to incorporate the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor. For more on these programs, see Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); and Alice O’Connor, Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).

24. Piercy was particularly hostile toward the New Criticism, which she encountered as an undergraduate in the 1950s. She details this early education in her autobiographical novel Braided Lives (New York: Summit Books, 1982).

25. Marge Piercy, Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), 105.

26. Piercy later contributed to the cyberpunk genre with her 1991 novel He, She, and It.

27. This concern with corporate control over professional work pervades Piercy’s fiction. For instance, it is at the center of the novels that precede and follow Woman on the Edge of Time: Small Changes (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1973) and The High Cost of Living (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). Both of these realist fictions feature heroines who are torn between their early experiences in the 1960s New Left and counterculture and their desire to assimilate into the professional class in the 1970s. In Small Changes, Miriam Berg, a computer programmer, finds herself designing software for a military, antimissile defense project. In The High Cost of Living, Leslie, a Ph.D. candidate in history, is involved in her advisor’s research project on capital investment, whose purpose is to demonstrate that “the development of industry [in the United States] was always intelligent and efficient” (198). In both cases, the novels suggest that women’s professional aspirations can be better fulfilled if they volunteer their time and experience to feminist collectives.

28. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970).

29. Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 85.

31. Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).

32. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1976), 260.

33. See Davis’s “Dynamic and Revolutionary Utopia” for more on Le Guin’s departure from the utopian tradition on this point.

34. Winter Eliott, “Breaching Invisible Walls: Individual Anarchy in The Dispossessed,” in Davis and Stillman, eds., New Utopian Politics, 153.

35. Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System (New York: Random House, 1960).

36. See, for instance, Le Guin’s introductory comments to “The Day Before the Revolution” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, 260.

37. Paul Goodman, Drawing the Line: The Political Essays of Paul Goodman, ed. Taylor Stoehr (New York: Free Life Editions, 1977), 3.

38. Cited in Urbanowicz, “Personal and Political,” 149.

39. Paul Goodman, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York: Random House, 1970), 21.

1. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985); all page references are to this edition and are hereafter noted parenthetically in the text.

2. Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 83.

3. The novel also briefly assimilates other novelistic genres: the disaster novel (in the middle section entitled “The Airborne Toxic Event”) and the noir crime novel (in the novel’s penultimate chapter). See Douglas Keesey, Don DeLillo (New York: Twayne, 1993), and Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), for accounts of DeLillo’s experiments with genre in this and other novels.

4. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).

5. Thomas Ferarro, “Whole Families Shopping at Night!” in New Essays on White Noise, ed. Frank Lentricchia (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20.

6. The Popular Culture Association branched off from the American Studies Association in 1969. Ray Browne founded the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University in 1973. For more on the early history of popular-culture studies, see Ray B. Browne, Mission Underway: The History of the Popular Culture Association /American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Movement, 1967–2001 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2002).

7. John G. Cawelti, “The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature,” Journal of Popular Culture 3, no. 3 (Winter 1969), 390.

8. In his 1970 introduction to the popular-culture discipline, Russel Nye concluded with a salvo against Dwight MacDonald’s critique of mass culture: “To a generation that found in The Beatles, Bogart movies, Marvel Group Comics, and Peanuts a new parameter of experience, the warnings of the older critics that popular culture was false and dangerous meant little” (The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America [New York: Dial Press, 1970], 419). For an account of how popular-culture studies was part of a broader, antielitist effort to redefine the concept of culture in the 1960s, see Mary Land, “Whatever Happened to ‘the Ooze at the Bottom of the Mass Mind’?” Journal of Popular Culture 9, no. 2 (Fall 1975): 423–32. Land argues that this effort also encompassed new developments in anthropology, history, and media theory.

9. Gregory Hall, “The Psychology of Fast Food Happiness,” in The Popular Culture Reader, ed. Jack Nachbar, Deborah Weiser, and John L. Wright (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1978), 133.

10. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972).

11. Stacey Olster, “White Noise,” in The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. John N. Duvall (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 84.

12. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 5.

14. Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe (1952; reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992); Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution, a Comedy (New York: Knopf, 1954); Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989); and Bernard Malamud, A New Life (1961; reprint, New York: Avon, 1980).

15. See Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), for an ambitious account of how creative-writing programs shaped American literature from the 1930s to the present.

16. M. Keith Booker, The Post-utopian Imagination: American Culture in the Long 1950s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), 94.

17. McCarthy, Groves of Academe, 69.

18. Browne recounts how, when he started to offer popular-culture courses at Bowling Green State University, “the frame of mind of the late 60s was still in the air, and many students wanted to continue their training in fields and methodologies that they thought ‘relevant’ and ‘useful’” (Mission Underway, 18).

19. Sean McCann and Michael Szalay discuss the connection among New Left libertarianism, entrepreneurial professionalism, and the emergence of theory and cultural studies: “It was ‘theory,’” they argue, “that presided over the intellectual marriage of professionalism and a newly fortified version of the ethos of the counterculture. And it was ‘theory’ as well that lent intellectual credibility to libertarian attitudes that would dominate the literary academy in the last decades of the twentieth century” (“Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking After the New Left,” Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 2 [2005], 455–56).

20. Lionel Trilling, “Our Country and Our Culture,” Partisan Review 19, no. 3 (May 1952), 321–22.

21. C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 353–73.

22. John McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 63.

23. Don DeLillo, Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 70.

24. All page references are to the 1997 Simon and Schuster edition of Underworld cited in note 4 and are hereafter noted parenthetically in the text.

25. McClure, Partial Faiths, 77.

26. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 220.

27. See Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Vintage, 1967).

28. Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, 222.

30. DeLillo’s resistance to the idea of a new-class “saving remnant” dedicated to cultural education is the point of his novels about creative artists, especially Great Jones Street (1973; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989) and Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1991). At first glance, Mao II seems like a dirge for the romantic idea that writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. DeLillo’s protagonist, the reclusive novelist Bill Gray, articulates the novel’s central thesis: “There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence.… Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken over that territory” (41). Gray later explains that Samuel Beckett was the last writer “to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings” (157). However, as Mark Osteen argues, DeLillo systematically undercuts Bill Gray’s thesis: “Were novelists ever so powerful? Was the notoriously reticent and difficult Beckett really a major influence on mass consciousness?” (“DeLillo’s Dedalian Artists,” in The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. John N. Duvall [Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008], 143). Instead, DeLillo’s artist novels describe their protagonists’ destruction at the hands of U.S. celebrity culture and subsequent regeneration through contact with the everyday. This trajectory is most obvious in the case of Great Jones Street, which tells the story of rock star Bucky Wunderlick’s physical, social, and linguistic isolation after he leaves his band midtour. The novel ends as Wunderlick immerses himself in New York’s European immigrant neighborhoods, preparing to reemerge with a rediscovered poetic voice drawn from this street culture.

1. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); all page references are to this edition and hereafter are noted parenthetically in the text.

2. Other studies that explore this problem include John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), and Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).

3. Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,” trans. Catherine Porter and Edward P. Morris, Diacritics 13, no. 3 (Fall 1983), 16.

4. Ibid., 16, 11, 16.

6. Mark Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 256.

9. Taylor’s career trajectory exemplifies the fact that these alternatives can be complementary; before he became interested in complexity theory and for-profit education, he was a prominent deconstructive critic interested in the intersections between Derrida’s work and Christian theology.

10. Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 2–3.

12. Ibid., 7; see William Gibson’s Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984).

13. See Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Sean McCann, A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); and Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).