United States literary history and class consciousness: Rethinking United States proletarian and Third World minority literatures.

Unlike romanticism, realism, naturalism, or modernism, U.S. proletarianism is a generic category that identifies itself not as a particular method, strategy, or style or with a period but with a social class and political agenda. Nonetheless, proletarian literature has largely been studied as the aberration of a singular moment of intense political, social, and cultural ferment in U.S. history--the Great Depression. Yet attempting to reconstruct a proletarian tradition, one finds a wealth of proletarian literary production since the Red Decade to the present which goes unnoticed either because it falls between the cracks of literary classifications and is excluded from literary study or because it has been generically classified such that its working-class politics are obscured or neutralized, as with many minority literary works that are understood in terms of a narrowly defined racial or ethnic identity. This dissertation investigates not only how the category of class can be brought to bear on individual texts but more importantly how it can be used as a generic principle for rethinking U.S. literary history and organizing the contemporary space of U.S. literature. While recent interventions into literary history and the ideology of canon formation have been conducted around the category of race and to a lesser extent nation, similar interventions have not been made to establish a class literature to challenge the implicit middle-class basis of literary study and bring into earshot the working-class traditions in U.S. literature. Defining the category of proletarian literature enables us to identify continuities between and among works that might otherwise by classified heterogeneously and to explore how categories of race, nation, and gender articulate with and complicate traditional understandings of class. Emphasizing U.S. third world literature and focussing on internal struggles around issues of race and gender, I explore how social and historical processes within the working class define that class according not only to changes in the material basis and productive relations of the class but also to changing political and ideological claims, assertions, and practices, conditioning and complicating the constitution of class consciousness.Ph.D.American literatureAmerican studiesEthnic studiesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129542/2/9527685.pd