Amateur Modernism: Literary Responses to Professional Society

Amateur Modernism argues that the rise of professional society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century triggered efforts to revivify and renovate the ostensibly anachronistic concept of amateurism. This project investigates how four modernist writers—Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dashiell Hammett—all employed the concept of amateurism in their work to signal not a rejection of professionalism, but a struggle against the codified systems and habits of mind it tended to produce. As I demonstrate, many modernist texts position amateurism and professionalism in a productive tension, combining the amateur pursuit of wide-ranging knowledge, pleasurable work, and improvisational thought, with the financial independence and expertise afforded by professional training. Modernists were often ambivalent about the promises of professionalism and invoked amateur attitudes they believed could repair cultural fragmentation, democratize learning, and make working life more pleasurable. Chapter One argues that Ford, ambivalently caught between his German ancestry and his work writing wartime propaganda for the British government, appealed to amateurism as broad general knowledge transcending national borders, and enabling him to negotiate the tensions between the patriotism that was demanded of him and the cosmopolitanism he admired. Chapter Two considers amateurism as a spontaneous and rambling habit of mind as it focuses upon Woolf’s efforts to incorporate amateurism into higher education and the professions by encouraging women, who were becoming professionals for the first time, to maintain their capacity to think in non-hierarchical and unspecialized ways. Chapter Three understands amateurism as a bridging impulse as it focuses on Hurston’s attempt to make disciplinary cultural anthropology accessible to a popular audience. Chapter Four examines how Hammett, inspired by the pleasurable work of the gentleman-amateur, argued that lower-middle class workers like his detective characters might covertly derive wry pleasure by improvising between the cracks of professional bureaucracies. By emphasizing the malleability of amateurism and professionalism during the modernist period, this dissertation offers a critique of scholarship that reads contemporary, calcified oppositions between the professions and amateurism back onto modernist debates.Ph