Ragged Figures: The Lumpenproletariat in Nelson Algren and Ralph Ellison.

Through a reconstruction of the mid-century careers of Nelson Algren and Ralph Ellison, Ragged Figures expands the identity of Marxism in U.S. literature beyond European theoretical orthodoxy, proletarian content, and social-protest form. These novelists revalue Marx’s minor concept of the lumpenproletariat as the central concept and literary figure of an alternative Marxist aesthetic, one grounded in the experiences and practices of marginalized peoples in the U.S during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. The lumpenproletariat (“proletariat in rags”) is one of Marxism’s more unstable concepts. Marx used the term to reference subjects who exist outside the labor-capital dialectic and who lack stable class identity: tramps, beggars, prostitutes, or the criminal underworld, for example. Because he deems such types marginal to the economic and political investments of Marxism, he deploys the term with a lack of empirical precision and a dismissive scorn. Reading Marx against the grain, and relying on the generative theoretical reformulations of Marxism undertaken by Louis Althusser, I re-theorize the lumpenproletariat as Marxism’s own name for the deconstructive productivity of the marginal. In its various political identities, its occupation of the gaps and interstices of social formations, and in the epistemological disruptions it poses to codified thought and ideology, the lumpenproletariat embodies a vantage point from beyond the margins of what orthodox Marxism knows, enabling situated revision and expansion of Marxism’s theoretical and political effectiveness. Algren and Ellison utilize both the experiences of lumpenproletarian characters—the “ragged” figures and populations shifting at the margins of U.S. society and ideological discourses—and this open-ended theoretical “raggedness” that the lumpenproletariat conceptualizes in order to do the work of figuring (out)—using the practical protocols of literary production and figurative language—contingent analyses of capitalism and attendant opportunities for resistance. By reconstituting Marxism around the figure of the lumpenproletariat and contingent re-imaginings of U.S. and African-American sociocultural realities and forms, Ellison and Algren produce an aesthetically-inventive, theoretically-adventurous mode of Marxist writing that forces us to reconsider the literary and political reputations of these writers and the unexpected presences of Marxism within U.S. and African-American literature and culture.PhDEnglish Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86576/1/nfmills_1.pd