Where the World Is Not: Cultural Authority and Democratic Desire in Modern American Literature

by Kim Savelson

Overview

How do novels that literally discuss invention and inventors engage through such discussions an array of critically important conversations and issues beyond invention? And to where and how can we trace and follow such discourses? In Where the World Is Not: Cultural Authority and Democratic Desire in Modern American Literature, Kim Savelson examines the ways in which resoundingly popular U.S. novels by Frank Norris, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ralph Ellison host the tug-of-war between thought and action, between the democratic agenda of the pragmatist movement and the aristocratic idea of aesthetics. Savelson argues for and reads these novels as a way of thinking through the implications for the meaning and making of “culture” brought about by the ongoing social revolution of democratic modernity. She thus expands the scope of the current work being done on pragmatism, as well as the work being done on literature and democracy, carving out an intersection of these two fields.
 
Savelson demonstrates that the questions under her consideration appeared at different key moments over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, embodying and deepening the struggle between the abstract and the practical, the cultural and the commercial—a struggle that turned into a dilemma and a period of growth for modern democratic desire. In so doing, she offers a historical recontextualization of selected literary texts, analyzing them as a way of thinking about intellectual history with subtlety and particularity.
 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814207468
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	05/22/2009
Edition description:	2
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Kim Savelson teaches at Stanford University in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction Democracy Stumbling: Inventing, Democratic Desire, and the Will to Believe 1

Chapter 1 A Plea for Pure Culture: The Pure Science Ideal 23

Chapter 2 The Romance of Process: Means Meets Ends in Frank Norris's McTeague 41

Chapter 3 "Where the World Is Not": Cultural Interest and Disinterest in Willa Gather's The Professor's House 60

Chapter 4 Classes and Masses: Willa Cather's "Purely Cultural Studies" and the "New Commercialism" 77

Chapter 5 "Missionaries of Culture": Du Bois' "Higher Aims" in Ellison's Invisible Man 109

Coda 141

Notes 143

Bibliography 181

Index 189

Editorial Reviews

Reprint of a 1968 book that assesses the contribution of Ohio and her leaders to the Union War effort during the Civil War. It comprises nine essays which each focus on an Ohio leader and his accomplishments. The men written about represent several walks of life in addition to the military, from journalism and the church to manufacturing and politics. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

What makes Where the World Is Not so compelling and valuable is Kim Savelson’s consistently intelligent, thoughtful, and penetrating discussion of pragmatism in relation to fundamental questions about the social authority of education and culture in the modern United States.” —Thomas Augst, associate professor of English at New York University
 
 
 



“The major contributions of Where the World Is Not lie in its identification of the trope of the inventor as a mediating figure in some well-known debates in intellectual history; its extended readings of canonical literary texts in exploring these debates; and its extension of its analysis to racial politics and the mid-twentieth century. It is an excellent piece of scholarship.” —John Swift, professor and chair of English and comparative studies, Occidental College

From the Publisher