MORE EXCERPTS ON PROPAGANDA, LITERATURE, SOCIETY, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

(1941) “The present article proposes to say something further on the subject of art and propaganda. It will attempt to set forth a line of reasoning as to why the contemporary emphasis must be placed largely upon propaganda, rather than upon ‘pure’ art…. Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable. And if it leads us to a state of acquiescence at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question, we get a paradox whereby the soundest adjunct to ethics, the aesthetic, threatens to uphold an unethical condition. For this reason it seems that under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art. Art cannot safely confine itself to merely using the values which arise out of a given social texture and integrating their conflicts, as the soundest, ‘purest’ art will do. It must have a definite hortatory function, an educational element of suasion or inducement; it must be partially forensic. Such a quality we consider to be the essential work of propaganda. Hence we feel that the moral breach arising from vitiation of the work-patterns calls for a propaganda art. And incidentally, our distinction as so stated should make it apparent that much of the so-called ‘pure’ art of the nineteenth century was of a pronouncedly propagandist or corrective coloring. In proportion as the conditions of economic warfare grew in intensity throughout the ‘century of progress,’ and the church proper gradually adapted its doctrines to serve merely the protection of private gain and the upholding of manipulated law, the ‘priestly’ function was carried on by the ‘secular’ poets, often avowedly agnostic.

          “Our thesis is by no means intended to imply that ‘pure’ art or ‘acquiescent’ art should be abandoned. There are two kinds of ‘toleration.’ Even if a given state of affairs is found, on intellectualistic grounds, to be intolerable, the fact remains that as long as it is with us we must more or less contrive to ‘tolerate’ it. Even though we might prefer to alter radically the present structure of production and distribution through the profit motive, the fact remains that we cannot so alter it forthwith. Hence, along with our efforts to alter it, must go the demand for an imaginative equipment that helps to make it tolerable while it lasts. Much of the ‘pure’ or acquiescent art of today serves this invaluable psychological end. For this reason the great popular comedians or handsome movie stars are rightly the idols of the people. Likewise the literature of sentimentality, however annoying and self-deceptive it may seem to the hardened ‘intellectual,’ is following in a direction basically so sound that one might wish more of our pretentious authors were attempting to do the same thing more pretentiously. On the other hand, much of the harsh literature now being turned out in the name of the ‘proletariat’ seems inadequate on either count. It is questionable as propaganda, since it shows us so little of the qualities in mankind worth saving. And it is questionable as ‘pure’ art, since by substituting a cult of disaster for a cult of amenities it ‘promotes our acquiescence’ to sheer dismalness. Too often, alas, it serves as a mere device whereby the neuroses of the decaying bourgeois structure are simply transferred to the symbols of workingmen. Perhaps more of Dickens is needed, even at the risk of excessive tearfulness” (271-278)

–Kenneth Burke, “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism,” The Philosophy of Literary Form

 

(1942) “Our modern literature was rooted in those dark and still little-understood years of the 1880’s and 1890’s when all America stood suddenly, as it were, between one society and another, one moral order and another, and the sense of impending change became almost oppressive in its vividness. It was rooted in the drift to the new world of factories and cities, with their dissolution of old standards and faiths; in the emergence of the metropolitan culture that was to dominate the literature of the new period; in the Populists who raised their voices against the domineering new plutocracy in the East and gave so much of their bitterness to the literature of protest rising out of the West; in the sense of surprise and shock that led to the crudely expectant Utopian literature of the eighties and nineties, the largest single body of Utopian writing in modern times, and the most transparent in its nostalgia. But above all was it rooted in the need to learn what the reality of life was in the modern era. In a word, our modern literature came out of those great critical years of the late nineteenth century which saw the emergence of modern America, and was molded in its struggles…. We live in a day when the brilliance of some of our critics seems to me equaled only by their barbarism. In my study in Chapter XIV of the twin fanaticisms that have sought to dominate criticism in America since 1930—the purely sociological and the purely textual-‘esthetic’ approach—I have traced some of the underlying causes for the aridity, the snobbery, the sheer human insensitiveness that have weighted down so much of the most serious criticism of our day….” (viii-xi).

–Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds

(1943) “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trouser in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”

–George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press” (Excerpt from the suppressed preface to Animal Farm; published 1972 in the Times Literary Supplement, also 1993, in the Everyman’s Library edition of Animal Farm)

(1949) “In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that cornerstone of American social protest fiction…speaking for the author…Miss Ophelia and St. Clare are terribly in earnest. Neither of them questions the medieval morality from which their dialogue springs: black, white, the devil, the next world—posing its alternatives between heaven and the flames—were realities for them as, of course, they were for their creator…. Mrs. Stowe’s novel, achieves a bright, almost a lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a witch. This is the more striking as one considers the novels of Negro oppression writers in our own, more enlightened day, all of which say only: ‘This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!’ (Let us ignore, for the moment, those novels of oppression written by Negroes, which add only a raging, near-paranoiac postscript to this statement and actually reinforce, as I hope to make clear later, the principles which activate the opposition they decry.)” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteousness, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty; Uncle Tom’s Cabin—like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants—is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe’s subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.” “But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe’s powers; she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still within the same constriction. How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth?” “[…] In Native Son, Bigger is Uncle Tom’s descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses…. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”

–James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Notes of a Native Son, 1955; American Literature, American Culture, 1999

(1950) “How should Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Germinal, and Mary Barton be classified? As proletarian literature? If Gentleman’s Agreement is a problem novel what is Daniel Deronda? Jack London may be a proletarian writer but his most famous book The Call of the Wild is an adventure story. George Sand has been called one of the founders of the ‘problem’ novel but the bulk of her output dealt with those bourgeois emotions: love and passion. I think one of the difficulties here is the refusal to recognize and admit the fact that not all of the concern about the shortcomings of society originated with Marx. Many a socially conscious novelist is merely a man or woman with a conscience. Though part of the cultural heritage of all of us derives from Marx, whether we subscribe to the Marxist theory or not, a larger portion of it stems from the Bible…”

–Ann Petry, “The Novel as Social Criticism,” African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 (Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed.)

(1955) “I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens and Twain? One hears a lot of complaints about the so-called ‘protest novel,’ especially when written by Negroes, but it seems to me that the critics could more accurately complain about their lack of craftsmanship and the provincialism.”

–Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview,” Collected essays, 2003; Shadow and Act, 1964

(1956) “Taken in its entirety, then, a half-century of the radical novel has had its effect on and made a contribution to American literature. It has also affected and contributed to American life, not just uniquely, however, but as part of the whole larger course of the novel of social protest, that tradition which has proliferated so variously in the troubled twentieth century and which extends back into the nineteenth through the early Hamlin Garland and the Utopians, through Mark Twain, in some of his moods, back to, and well before, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin did as much to change the face of the nation as, perhaps, all the proletarian novels put together. This tradition, which is certainly a great, though not the only one, the radical novel of the present century has helped to continue. Despite their orientation toward Marxism, the Socialist, the proletarian, the independently radical novelists have not been able to obscure the fact that in essential ways they represented yet another manifestation of the American middle-class conscience, which has been the major force behind the literature of social criticism from Harriet Stowe down even to the present day. Viewed as part of a developing process, the radical novel shares in the value of the whole, the value of protest against the still limited democracy that is an affirmation of the democracy that can be. For protest is valuable, quite as valuable as that acceptance without which no continuing social organization is possible. Whether wrong-headed or right, protest will always be essential in order to stir our civilization into self-awareness and thus prevent it from stiffening into an inhuman immobility. In the frequently unwise thirties this rather elementary final statement would have been assumed. That it must now be asserted indicates that the fifties have their own particular lack of wisdom…” [In the 1992 introduction, Rideout notes:  “Rereading The Radical Novel in the United States for the first time in decades…it struck me as a reasonably good book…though I did wonder how I could have had the patience to get through so many awful novels in order to reach the fewer worthwhile ones…. In a few reviews, two linked objections emerged…: first, that I had too rigidly limited my subject by defining a radical novel as ‘one which demonstrates, either explicitly or implicitly, that the author objects to the human suffering imposed by some socioeconomic system and advocates that the system be fundamentally changed.’ Granted this definition required me to discuss many bad novels and not to discuss certain better ones; but even bad novels can be illustrative, and it seemed, and still seems, to me that such a sociopolitical definition enabled me to treat in some depth a specifically sociopolitical genre of fiction aimed at fundamental change rather than at reform which would improve the system but not change it basically. Better a limiting definition, I would argue, than one which might turn out to be imprecise and overinclusive.” “My point may be clearer if I move to a second objection, a corollary of the first, that I should have written about the much more extensive fiction of ‘social protest.’ Suppose I had written or tried to write the kind of book these reviewers had wanted me to instead of the one I did. Quite aside from the probability that the ratio of bad to good social protest novels would be about the same as bad to good radical ones, I would have been faced with two problems: how should ‘the fiction of social protest’ be defined, and how could I, or anyone, hope to cover thoroughly in a single volume a very large and disunified field? For really, in American fiction just of the first half of the twentieth century there were many different kinds of social protest going on…. ”

–Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States—1900-1954

(1957) “This book is meant primarily as a study of the relations between literature and ideas, though a considerable part of it, I should say, consists of literary criticism. My interest was far less in literature as social evidence or testimony than in the literary problem of what happens to the novel when it is subjected to the pressures of politics and political ideology. In discussing nineteenth century writers I have employed more or less conventional methods of criticism, while in treating twentieth century writers I have found myself placing a greater stress upon politics and ideology as such; but this was not the result of any preconceived decision, it was a gradual shift in approach that seemed to be required by the nature of the novels themselves” (11).

       “The greatest of all political novels, The Possessed, was written with the explicit purpose of excommunicating all beliefs that find salvation anywhere but in the Christian God. ‘I mean to utter certain thoughts,’ wrote Dostoevsky, ‘whether all the artistic side of it goes to the dogs or not…even if it turns into a mere pamphlet, I shall say all that I have in my heart.’ Fortunately Dostoevsky could not suppress his ‘artistic side’ and by the time his book reaches its end it has journeyed through places of the head and heart undreamed of in his original plan. But whatever else it does, The Possessed proves nothing of the kind that might be accessible to proof in ‘a mere pamphlet.’ For while a political novel can enrich our sense of human experience, while it can complicate and humanize our commitments, it is only very rarely that it will alter those commitments themselves. And when it does so, the political novel is engaged in a task of persuasion which is not really its central or distinctive purpose. I find it hard to imagine, say, a serious socialist being dissuaded from his belief by a reading of The Possessed, though I should like equally to think that the quality and nuance of that belief can never be quite as they were before he read The Possessed.

       “Because it exposes the impersonal claims of ideology to the pressures of private emotion, the political novel must always be in a state of internal warfare, always on the verge of becoming something other than itself. The political novelist—the degree to which he is aware of this is another problem—establishes a complex system of intellectual movements, in which his own opinion is one of the most active yet not entirely dominating movers. Are we not close here to one of the ‘secrets’ of the novel in general?—I mean the vast respect which the great novelist is ready to offer to the whole idea of opposition, the opposition he needs to allow for in his book against his own predispositions and yearnings and fantasies. He knows that his own momentum, his own intentions, can be set loose easily enough; but he senses, as well, that what matters most of all is to allow for those rocks against which his intentions may smash but, if he is lucky, they may merely bruise. Even as the great writer proudly affirms the autonomy of his imagination, even as he makes the most severe claims for his power of imposing his will upon the unformed materials his imagination has brought up to him, he yet acknowledges that he must pit himself against the imperious presence of the necessary. And in the political novel it is politics above all, politics as both temptation and impediment, that represents the necessary.”

       “[…] The criteria for evaluation of a political novel must finally be the same as those for any other novel: how much of our life does it illuminate? how ample a moral vision does it suggest?—but these questions occur to us in a special context, in that atmosphere of political struggle which dominates modern life. For both the writer and the reader, the political novel provides a particularly severe test: politics rakes our passions as nothing else, and whatever we may consent to overlook in reading a novel, we react with an almost demonic rapidity to a detested political opinion. For the writer the great test is, how much truth can he force through the sieve of his opinions? For the reader the great test is, how much of that truth can he accept though it jostle his opinions?” (22-24).

–Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel

(1957) “In Czarist Russia of the mid-19^th–century, a didactic theory of literature was strongly invited not only by political and social conditions but by the actual pre-eminence of a generation of socially conscious novelists…. The greatest Russian literary figure to participate in the 19^th-century complex of socio-realistic theory and the writer whose pronouncements on art have impinged with most authority on the English literary mind, was undoubtedly Tolstoy—‘the conscience of Russia’ in his time, ‘the conscience of the world’ ‘the conscience of humanity’…. He was in his middle age a violent convert to a kind of Christian thinking. A period of furious tractarian activity followed the production of the great novels. And it is a religious theory of literature that near the end of his life issues in his thunderously deliberate denunciation of all that he himself and all that European artists for 300 years had created…. The destruction of the idea ‘art for art’s sake’ and the reconstruction of art as a monitor and propagandist for the social process is the gist of Tolstoy’s preachment, and this has been also the monotonous burden of subsequent Marxist criticism in Russia and the instructed echoes of this in English and American writing which sounded in the later 1920’s and the 1930’s… In America the idea of a socially activist literature appears during the first decades of the 20^th century with the ‘muckraking’ movement (of which Upton Sinclair’s Mammonart, 1924, may stand as the sufficient symbol) and after that in the overtly Marxist criticism of the later twenties and the thirties—the work of such writers as Michael Gold, editor of the New Masses, Joseph Freeman, editor of the anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States, 1935, and V.F. Calverton, editor of the Modern Quarterly….” [Ignored here, among others, W.E.B. DuBois, editor of Crisis] “A major monument was Vernon Louis Parrington’s three-volume Main Currents in American thought (1927-1930)…. Marxism and the forms of social criticism more closely related to it [V.L. Parrington, et. al.] have never had any real concern with literature and literary problems. In this country the cause enlisted some keen journalistic and literary minds. But a number of them, like Max Eastman as editor of The Masses, avoided sociology in their literary criticism. Eastman shied away from doctrinal and scientific claims for literature and worked up a theory of vivid sensory realization that belongs rather in the tradition of art for art’s sake. Edmund Wilson in Axel’s Castle, 1931, made gestures acknowledging the social responsibility of the artist but only as if in atonement for his having dwelt at such length among the mysteries of symbolism. As early as the anthology acclaiming Proletarian Literature in 1935, the editors of the Partisan Review were observing a flow of ‘gush’ and ‘invective,’ in place of analysis, and the exercise of Marxism as a ‘sentiment’ rather than a ‘science.’ James T. Farrell’s A Note on Literary Criticism, 1936, is a critique by an ‘amateur Marxist’ of the party-line simplifications. By 1939 it was possible for the Partisan editor Philip Rahv to write an essay under the title ‘Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy.’ Marxist naturalism persists in American letters today less as a proclaimed cause than as a deeply rooted sympathy (A Gnostic utopianism) ready with each shift in political or literary dialectics to exert itself in a new stratagem” (460-471).

–Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History

(1958) “There is the intricate, yet ultimately persuasive, distinction which Marxist theory draws between ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism.’ It goes back to Hegel’s reflections on the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hegel found that in the Homeric epics the depiction of physical objects, however detailed and stylized, did not intrude upon the rhythm and vitality of the poem. Descriptive writing in modern literature, on the other hand, struck him as contingent and lifeless…. Compared to Homeric or even to medieval times, modern man inhabits the physical world like a rapacious stranger. These ideas greatly influenced Marx and Engels. It contributed to their own theory of the ‘alienation’ of the individual under capitalist modes of production. In the course of their debate with Lassalle and of their study of Balzac, Marx and Engels came to believe that this problem of estrangement was directly germane to the problem of realism in art. The poets of antiquity and the ‘classical realists’ (Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac) had achieved an organic relationship between objective reality and the life of the imagination. The ‘naturalist,’ on the other hand, looks on the world as on a warehouse of whose contents he must make a feverish inventory. ‘A sense of reality,’ says a contemporary Marxist critic, ‘is created not by a reproduction of all the features of an object but by a depiction of those features that form the essence…while in naturalistic art—because of a striving to achieve an elusive fullness—the image, also incomplete, places both the essential and the secondary, the unimportant, on the same plane.’ This distinction is far reaching. It bears on the decline of French realism after Balzac and Stendhal, and tells us something of Zola’s obsessive attempt to make of the novel an index of the world. By virtue of it, we may discriminate between the ‘realism’ of Chekhov and the ‘naturalism’ of, say, Maupassant. Through it, also, we may ascertain that Madame Bovary, for all its virtues, is a slighter thing than Anna Karenina. In naturalism there is accumulation; in realism what Henry James called the ‘deep-breathing economy’ of organic form…” (321-322).

       “At the origins of the Marxist theory of literature there are three celebrated and canonic texts. Two of them are citations from Engels’ letters [to Kautsky and Harkness]; the third is contained in a short essay by Lenin [“Party Organization and Party Literature”]…. Engels is not objecting to a litérature engagée as such but rather to the mixture ‘of mere empiricism and empty subjectivity’ in the bourgeois novel of the period. Obviously dissatisfied with this treatment of the problem, Lukács reverted to it in 1945, in his ‘Introduction to the Writings on Aesthetics of Marx and Engels.’ Here he contends that Engels was distinguishing between two forms of litérature à thèse (it is significant that the English language and its critical vocabulary have developed no precisely equivalent expression). All great literature, in Lukács’ reading, has a ‘fundamental bias.’ A writer can only achieve a mature and responsible portrayal of life if he is committed to progress and opposed to reaction, if he ‘loves the good and rejects the bad.’ When a critic of Lukacs’ subtlety and rigor descends to such banalities—banalities which directly challenge his own works on Goethe, Balzac, and Tolstoy—we know that something is amiss. The attempt to reconcile the image of literature implicit in Lenin’s essay with that put forward by Engels is a rather desperate response to the pressures of orthodoxy and to the Stalinist demand for total internal coherence in Marxist doctrine. Even the most delicate exegesis cannot conceal the plain fact that Engels and Lenin were saying different things, that they were pointing toward contrasting ideals” (305-307).

       “Marxist-Leninism and the political régimes enacted in its name take literature seriously, indeed desperately so. At the very height of the Soviet revolution’s battle for physical survival, Trotsky found occasion to assert that ‘the development of art is the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch.’ Stalin himself deemed it essential to add to his voluminous strategic and economic pronouncements a treatise on philology and the problems of language in literature. In a Communist society the poet is regarded as a figure central to the health of the body politic. Such regard is cruelly manifest in the very urgency with which the heretical artist is silenced or hounded to destruction. To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs—but a tribute nevertheless” (323).

–George Steiner, “Marxism and the Literary Critic,” in Language and Silence, 1967

(1962) “I’ve been trying to measure the gap between the public and the poet, and to find some explanation why it is so great. I began with the time when there was neither poet nor public, when the anonymous song or ballad was transmitted from generation to generation by the peasantry, and poetry was a possession so common that poet and audience were lost in it; we have been irreversibly changed. At best we can gain from that or oral poetry that beauty which is in it, and the knowledge that poetry is not a thing reserved for a few, since it was once, and for a long time, treasured and fostered by so many. If, knowing this, we could be brought to modify our contemporary notion of poetry as a rarified and special and often difficult thing, it might have a salutary effect on our criticism and our practice of poetry as well…” (94) “There is a greater poetry than that of the ballads; they [ballads] do not contain those universal statements of life which we find in Dante and Shakespeare; but they were once a general possession as Shakespeare has never been. And that great poetry can, or once could, be a general possession is a fact which we should not forget: those of us who write poetry, and those of us who criticize it. If we could keep it in mind, I think it would give us a more just and adequate idea of poetry…” (22) “[A reporter] also quoted Mr. [T. S.] Eliot as saying that ‘criticism of poetry began and ended in enjoyment,’ which I think is the traditional practice. But the observation that is most illuminating in this report is that ‘a genuine poem may arouse a very great number of differing responses, yet there will be always something in common between them,’ and that this is what poetry is for. There have been some very strange responses to poems, as Mr. Richards has shown so convincingly in his book, Practical Criticism, responses which seemed plainly to contradict one another. Yet, even allowing for this, there will be something in common between people’s varied responses to a poem, and the poem exists for that purpose. If we believe this, poetry takes on a wider significance than it is currently allowed, and lets in the ordinary unanalytical reader, and with him human nature. People will read poetry for enjoyment, since that is what it is intended for; and they will not, except in a few exceptional cases, take it up as a strict methodical study. And it may be said that they will get more help, both in enjoyment and understanding, from the traditional critic who tells them what the poem means to him, than from the new one who warns them that it cannot possibly mean what it appears to mean, so that he has no choice left but to explain it. The divorce between the public audience and the poet is widened by this critical method; or perhaps one should rather say that the method legalizes the divorce as a settled and normal state. And that is what we feel to be wrong… (76-77)

          “The first allegiance of any poet is to imaginative truth…but it does not mean that he should turn inward into the complex problems of poetry, or be concerned with poetry as a problem. That is something which has commonly happened in the last fifty years. There was some excuse for it after the years of experiment associated with Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound. To them, about 1910, poetry seemed to have come to a dead end, and intense thought had to be given to it. The experiments of that time and the succeeding years have become a part of literary history. As they were new and strange when they were first attempted, they were found difficult by the reader; and they seem to have left for a time in the minds of poets and critics the belief that poetry should be difficult. The experimenters have done their work, and we should be thankful to them. There have been many experimenters in English poetry: Chaucer was one; and Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Wordsworth were all experimenters. The experimenters of forty years ago did something to poetry and something for poetry. One kind of poetry was written before T.S. Eliot, and another kind after him. But the point of an experiment is that it should solve the particular problem set for it. This was done in the twenties…. There remains the temptation for poets to turn inward into poetry, to lock themselves in to a hygienic prison where they speak only to one another, and to the critic, their stern warder. In the end a poet must create his audience, and to do that he must turn outward. Even if he is conscious of having no audience, he must imagine one. That may be the way to conjure it out of the public void. Yeats, who had to wait for it long, declared that you must have an audience, and that he could not write without one. Anyone reading his poetry must feel that the audience was an imaginary one long before it became real. To imagine an audience, one must hold up before himself the variety of human life, for from that diversity the audience will be drawn. The poet need not think of the public—its vastness and impersonality would daunt anyone; he should reflect instead that in no other age than ours—I mean the last hundred years or so—has a poet had to deal with it. He has to see past it, or through it, to the men and women, with their individual lives, who in some strange way and without their choice are part of it, and yet are hidden by it (108-110). 

–Edwin Muir, The Estate of Poetry

(1963) “That Karl Marx could not have envisioned the extremes to which the Soviet totalitarians would put his literary theories is obvious. We know, for instance, that his colleague Frederick Engels wrote the following in a letter to an early ‘proletarian’ novelist who asked for Engel’s help in popularizing his novel: ‘Look at your heroine, with her dialectical materialist eyes and her economic determinist nose and her surplus value mouth. You take her in your arms and you kiss her. I know I wouldn’t want to’ ” (145). 

–Vernon Hall, Jr., A Short History of Literary Criticism

(1963) “When President Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe with the words, ‘So you’re the little woman who made the book that made this great war,’ he was speaking as a political realist who had learned by experience to respect the power of the pen. It was not for him to refer slightingly to ‘mere literature.’ Without Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the opinion of Sumner, there would have been no Lincoln in the White House.

       “But the historian must avoid hyperbole. In spite of the enormous vogue of Mrs. Stowe’s novel, it is doubtful if a book had much power to change the course of events. More persuasive than her tender pleadings was the harsh propaganda carried on by Abolitionists for over thirty years. And mightiest of all was the trend of liberal opinion through the nineteenth century, which was bound to sweep out of existence even the most beneficent and patriarchal of feudal survivals. In the last analysis slavery was abolished because men could no longer endure the thought of it. Shrewd common people were the first to sense how the tide was turning” (563).

–Robert E. Spiller, Ed. et. al., Literary History of the United States

(1964) “American writers have repeatedly been worried, confused, or angered—rarely amused—by the irreconcilability of American ideals and American experience, and one result of this sense of the gulf between the way things should be and the way things are, has been a readiness to regard the novel as a political instrument. English reform movements have tended to be dominated by intellectuals, whose preferred media have been the essay and, occasionally, the problem play. In seeking to achieve radical alterations in society, they have not directly sought mass support; in fact, much of their attention has been directed to the problem of restraining popular unrest and of guiding it into the most profitable channels. …the novels of Ignatius Donnelly, Edward Bellamy, William Dean Howells and many others were the often unsubtle but nonetheless powerful advocates of a wide variety of political doctrines and Utopian dreams. At the end of the nineteenth century, writers such as Gustavus Myers, Jacob Riis, and Lincoln Steffens showed that straight reporting might in certain circumstances be more effective than fiction, but Jack London and Upton Sinclair, more doctrinaire in their approach to social problems, continued to preach socialism through the medium of the novel—presumable because it was wider in its circulation, simpler in its appeal, and less hampered by the discipline of observable fact.

       “In addition to these narrowly political writers there have been the many novelists of social protest. Early in the century there were the ‘muckrakers,’ such as Winston Churchill, William Allen White, Robert Herrick, and Ernest Poole; later came Anderson, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, the ‘proletarians,’ and Norman Mailer. For all the differences between them, such novelists of social protest have at least one thing in common: They approach society not in a responsive or sensitive way but with their minds already made up; they come armed not only with their talents but with a theory. It is of the essence of the novelist’s job that he should impose a pattern upon his material, but these novelists impose a pattern not of art but, in the broadest sense, of politics. “[…] It can be argued that the delineation of society as such is a dubious undertaking for any artist. Again and again the material takes charge, as it does in Dreiser; or the political intention takes charge, as in so many of the novelists of social protest; or there is a tendency for the social material, the ‘information,’ to become separated out from the ostensible action of the novel…. The proper function of social description in a novel must be to define and illuminate the human predicament. This is something which English novelists seem almost automatically to have accepted. Many American novelists have not accepted it, and they have often squandered their powers as a result” (196-200).

       “In the last analysis, what we ask of the social novelist is not so much that he should reflect our view of society, but that he should make us see society his way” (205) and that such novelists “look beyond [the national experience] to the universal human experience of which it is inevitably a part” (212). “In admiring the novels of George Eliot, we need to remember that what seems to us the accuracy of her social observation is in some degree an indication of her greatness as a novelist, of her power to make us accept the image of society she presents. It matters little whether or not William Faulkner’s novels give an ‘accurate’ picture of the South; what matters supremely is that Faulkner presents his South, the world of Yoknapatawpha County, solidly and vividly, both as a setting and as a conditioning environment…” (205).

–Michael Millgate, American Social Fiction

(1965) “It can be said at once, I should think, that we are all agreed upon the most important point: that morality as shown through human relationships is the whole heart of fiction, and the serious writer has never lived who dealt with anything else. And yet, the zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction much good. The exception occurs when it can rise to the intensity of satire, where it finds a better home in the poem or the drama.” 

–Eudora Welty, “Must the Novelist Crusade” (1965), in The Eye of the Story (1978)

(1978) “A study of the writer as a critic of society that ends with science-fiction fantasies and anti-war novels such as A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch-22 had better acquire what academic respectability it can by starting with the ancient Greeks, with Plato in fact. In Plato’s Republic, that early blueprint for a benevolent dictatorship and first example of Utopian fantasy, no place can be found for the imaginative writer. In justification Plato gives three reasons. The poet, he argues, deals with reality at two removes. He tells lies about the gods and heroes, a complaint that is not difficult to translate into terms that would be applicable to any modern dictatorship. And he appeals to emotions, when he should appeal to man’s noblest faculty, the reason. ‘We shall,’ says Plato ‘bow down before a being with such miraculous powers of giving pleasure; but we shall tell him that we are not allowed to have any such person in our commonwealth; we shall crown him with fillets of wool, anoint his head with myrrh, and conduct him to another country’ (Republic, Book 10). Regretfully, because Plato is certainly not unaware of the sublime powers possessed by the inspired poet, but firmly and magisterially, this stern moral puritan dismisses the poet from his ideal state. Here, then, in Plato’s Republic, we have the first memorable statement of the clash between two ideals of order: the inspired order of the artist and the imposed order of the state, an opposition that permeates Romantic and post-Romantic literature. And in exiling the artist from his ideal state, Plato is the first to create for him that very modern role, the Outsider….

       “The successful critic of society, it may be suggested, is the writer who learns the wisdom of indirection. He is the writer who learns to combine instruction with delight, without in any way compromising his integrity of blunting the force of his social criticism. Some literary forms are especially suited to methods of indirect attack: satire, for example. From the time of the Greeks onwards, satirists have invented a variety of ways to maintain apparent detachment and the indirect approach, while pressing home their attack. The three commonest forms are the beast fable, the imaginary journey, and the Utopian fantasy. The beast fable has been used by the Greek dramatist Aristophanes in the Frogs, by Chaucer in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and by George Orwell in Animal Farm. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels provides a model for the imaginary journey, while the history of literary utopias stretches—to take it no further—from More’s sixteenth-century Utopia, to Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Morris’s News From Nowhere (1891), and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). It is essential for the satirist’s purpose to shock us into seeing our own familiar world through unfamiliar eyes; some radical change of perspective is therefore absolutely necessary. Each of the three devices, the beast fable, the imaginary journey, and Utopian fantasy achieves this end” (1-2).

–John Colmer, “The Writer as Critic of Society,” Coleridge to Catch-22: Images of Society

(1983) “If we refer to the nineteenth century as the Age of Ideology, then it seems even more appropriate to regard the present century as the Age of Propaganda…. The relationship of literature and art to propaganda is not at all straightforward, and would in any case be dismissed as insignificant by many modern critics, whose evaluative criteria would lead them to make a distinction between ‘real literature’ and ‘tendentious’ writing. Even so, George Orwell, who stated that ‘all art is to some extent propaganda’…, was probably closer to the truth than Hitler, who on one occasion was heard echoing the popular view that ‘art has nothing to do with propaganda’…. Not the least of ironies contained in these seemingly contradictory statements is the fact that Hitler’s remarks were addressed to Josef Goebbels who, as head of the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, had attempted to create a state apparatus for thought control which could have served as a model for the perfect totalitarian state depicted in Orwell’s novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four…. Propaganda does not often come marching towards us waving swastikas and chanting ‘Seig Heil’; its power lies in its capacity to conceal itself, to appear natural, to coalesce completely and indivisibly with the values and accepted power symbols of a given society. When Hitler claimed that art had nothing to do with propaganda he was anticipating a perfectly integrated Nationalist Socialist Germany whose art would spontaneously and unthinkingly reproduce the desired images and perceptions. Even in the early revolutionary period of the Third Reich, Goebbels, who had objected to the word propaganda being used in the title of his Ministry, insisted that ‘news is best given out in such a way that it appears to be without comment but is itself tendentious’…. If a simple principle can be derived from the discussion so far, it is that the recognition of propaganda can be seen as a function of the ideological distance which separates the observer from the act of communication observed…. Hitler’s assertion that art has nothing to do with propaganda does not contradict Orwell’s statement that all art is propaganda, but is rather contained within it, for the propaganda-free art which Hitler envisaged was an art within which the values and beliefs of National Socialism would be dominant, invisible and totally natural. This ‘illusion of pure aestheticism’ was for Orwell a reminder that ‘propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose—a political, social and religious purpose—that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs’…. Although there is no ready-made method for detecting propaganda, we can become aware of the general categories in which it manifests itself and we can attempt to classify its techniques and forms…. This approach does not mean that we must study literature as a set of documents rather than as a set of aesthetic objects. For in effect it denies the validity of such a distinction by assuming that the propagandistic or demystifying moment of literary communication may be inseparable from its aesthetic function….”

–A. P. Foulkes, Literature and Propaganda (from the Introduction and Conclusion)

(1983) “In ordinary critical usage, the term ‘roman à thèse’ has a strongly negative connotation; it designates works that are too close to propaganda to be artistically valid. No self-respecting writer would consent to call his novels by that name. A roman à thèse is always the work of an ‘other’… There do exist a few critical studies, published quite a while ago, that discuss [certain] novels…as ‘political novels’ or as examples of ‘committed’ or engagé literature. Neither of these categories corresponds exactly, however, to the roman à thèse. The political novel as a generic category is at once too broad (Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme is, as Irving Howe has shown, a superb political novel, but it is not a roman à thèse) and too narrow (Mauriac’s ‘Catholic novel,’ Le Noeud de vipers, is a roman à thèse, but not a political novel). As for ‘littérature engagée,’ it is too imprecise a term to designate a genre; furthermore, I feel it is too specifically associated with the name of Sartre, who did not invent the term but who made it current—and who, incidentally, went out of his way to distinguish ‘engagé’ novels from roman à these (although it may once again have been a matter of rejecting the name rather than the thing itself)…. As a starting point, I propose the following definition: a roman à thèse is a novel written in the realistic mode (that is, based on an aesthetic of verisimilitude and representation), which signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent, seeking to demonstrate the validity of a political, philosophical, or religious doctrine…. One could…claim that every novel, indeed every work of fiction…, can be read as expounding a ‘thesis,’ to the extent that it is always possible to extract from it a general maxim of some kind…. Following this line of reasoning, one would soon have to conclude that the roman à thèse is everywhere and nowhere—in other words, that it is a phenomenon of reading (viewed from a certain angle, all works are didactic) rather than of writing. At that point, there would be no reason to try to define a genre called roman à thèse, for the concept of genre implies that there exist certain properties that texts have in common, not that (or not only that) there exist certain modes of reading—or as is commonly said nowadays, certain interpretive strategies—that can be applied to any and every text. [However]…I consider undeniable…: there exist nontrivial differences between and among texts, as well as between readers, or between interpretive strategies that readers deploy in order to understand a text. Novels that are roman à thèse have certain identifiable traits which distinguish them from other novels and other genres. One of these traits, and no doubt the most important one is that romans à thèse forumulate, in an insistent, consistent, and unambiguous manner, the thesis (or theses) they seek to illustrate…. Whether its thesis is conservative or radical, defending the status quo or calling for its abolition, the roman à thèse is essentially an authoritarian genre: it appeals to the need for certainty, stability, and unity that is one of the elements of the human psyche; it affirms absolute truths, absolute values” (3-10).

–Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, (1983)

(1983) Introductory quotations from Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Authoritarian Fictions:

       “Literature, as it has been understood by all the masters, is an interpretation of life. It eliminates in order to prove.” –Maurice Barrès

       “All literature is propaganda. […] Art, for us, is what makes propaganda effective, what is capable of moving men in the direction we wish. –Paul Nizan

       “Then comes the modern question: why is there not today (or at least so it seems to me), why is there no longer an art of intellectual persuasion, or imagination? Why are we so slow, so indifferent about mobilizing narrative and the image? Can’t we see that it is, after all, works of fiction, no matter how mediocre they may be artistically, that best arouse political passion? –Roland Barthes

       “…it is the very notion of a work created for the expression of a social, political, economic, moral, etc. content that constitutes a lie.”

–Alain Robbe-Grillet

(1987-1999) “[Orwell’s Problem: how is it that oppressive ideological systems are able to] instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with the obvious facts about the world around us?” “If Orwell, instead of writing 1984—which was actually, in my opinion, his worst book, a kind of trivial caricature of the most totalitarian society in the world, which made him famous and everybody loved him, because it was the official enemy—if instead of doing that easy and relatively unimportant thing, he had done the hard and important thing, namely talk about Orwell’s Problem [as pertains to England and western states], he would not have been famous and honored: he would have been hated and reviled and marginalized.” […]  “About Orwell's 1984, I thought, frankly, it was one of his worst books. Could barely finish it. Some parts (e.g., about Newspeak) were clever. But most of it seemed to me—well, trivial. The problem is not a very interesting one; the modes of thought control and repression in totalitarian societies are fairly transparent. In fact, they often tend to be rather lax. Franco Spain, for example, didn't care much what people thought and said: the screams from the torture chamber in downtown Madrid were enough to keep the lid on. It's not too well known, but the Soviet Union was also pretty lax, particularly in the Brezhnev era. According to US government-Russian Research Center studies, Russians apparently had considerably wider access to a broad range of opinion and to dissident literature than Americans do, not because it is denied them but because propaganda is so much more effective here. Orwell was well aware of these issues. His (suppressed) introduction to Animal Farm, for example, deals explicitly with "literary censorship in England." To write about that topic would have been important, hard, and serious—and would have earned him the obloquy that attends departure from the rules.

       “Caricature can be very well done. Swift is marvelous, for example. Animal Farm is pretty good, in my opinion. But 1984 I thought was a serious decline from his best work. Caricature is an art, and not an easy one. But when well done, a very important one. As for dealing with Orwell's problem, I try to do it in the ways I know how to pursue; 1000s of pages by now. No doubt there are other ways, maybe better ways. But others will have to find what works for them. …my co-author Edward Herman has done excellent work of caricature on Orwell's problem. I am thinking of his work on "doublespeak," including a book, modeled more or less on Ambrose Bierce.” 

"If you want to learn about people’s personalities and intentions, you would probably do better reading novels than reading psychology books. Maybe that’s the best way to come to an understanding of human beings and the way they act and feel, but that’s not science. Science isn’t the only thing in the world, it is what it is...science is not the only way to come to an understanding of things.” “If I am interested in learning about people, I’ll read novels rather than psychology.” “I think the Victorian novel tells us more about people than science ever will...and we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” “We learn from literature as we learn from life; no one knows how, but it surely happens. In fact, most of what we know about things that matter comes from such sources, surely not from considered rational inquiry (science), which sometimes reaches unparalleled depths of profundity, but has a rather narrow scope.” “It is almost certain that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called ‘the full human person’ than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do. “[However] I’ve been always resistant consciously to allowing literature to influence my beliefs and attitudes with regard to society and history.” “There are things I resonate to when I read, but I have a feeling that my feelings and attitudes were largely formed prior to reading literature.” “Look, there’s no question that as a child, when I read about China, this influenced my attitudes–-Rickshaw Boy, for example. That had a powerful effect when I read it. It was so long ago I don’t remember a thing about it, except the impact. And I don’t doubt that, for me, personally, like anybody, lots of my perceptions were heightened and attitudes changed by literature over a broad range–Hebrew Literature, Russian literature, and so on. But ultimately, you have to face the world as it is on the basis of other sources of evidence that you can evaluate.” “If I want to understand the nature of China and its revolution, I ought to be cautious about literary renditions.” “Literature can heighten your imagination and insight and understanding, but it surely doesn’t provide the evidence that you need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions.” “I can think of things I read that had a powerful effect on me, but whether they changed my attitudes and understanding in any striking or crucial way, I can’t really say.” “People certainly differ, as they should, in what kinds of things make their minds work.” “I don’t really feel that I can draw any tight connections [personally].”

–Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, biographies, etc…

(1988) "When the MLA put together its centennial issue of PMLA in May 1984, it commissioned Paul Lauter to write about the impact of society on the profession of literary criticism between 1958 and 1983. Lauter was a radical associated with the Movement in the sixties.... According to Lauter, the MLA between the fifties and the eighties had expanded and diversified immensely, yet ‘the hierarchy of the profession remains fundamentally unaltered, so—as yet—does the hierarchy of what we value’…. This conclusion was based on two surveys of hundreds of syllabi collected from around the nation in the eighties. Just as the reigning critical ideology in the late 1950s was ‘formalism,’ so the dominant mode of criticism in the 1980s was ‘formalism,’ however expanded to include hermeneutics, semiotics, and poststructuralism, all of which criticism ‘accepts the formalist stance by analyzing texts, including its own discourse, primarily as autonomous objects isolated from their social origins or functions’…. What most dismayed Lauter about such fashionable criticism were its alignment with linguistics and philosophy rather than history and sociology, its tendency to become obscurant self-referential metacriticism in a debauch of professionalism, its preference for a limited canon of elitist texts, its increasing abnegation of practical exegesis and humanistic values, and its deepening occupation of the core of the profession”…. [Even the rebirth of Marxist criticism in the 1970s deviated from “history and sociology” in that]: “What was odd about the Marxist criticism of this [1970s] Renaissance associated with the post-1950s new left and the Movement was its complete disregard of the old left. Mention was never made of V. F. Calverton, James T. Farrell, Granville Hicks, Bernard Smith, Edmund Wilson, or other Leftist Critics prominent in the thirties. The native tradition of radicalism stemming from the nineteenth century had been forgotten during the heyday of the new left….”

          “In H. Bruce Franklin’s view, what was wrong with academic literary professionals was their thorough immersion in the bourgeois ideology of formalism, which itself was rooted in the counterrevolutionary antiproletarianism of the thirties. ‘In the present era, formalism is the use of aestheticism to blind us to social and moral reality’….”

           “Rather than an instrument or weapon of ruling-class oppression, literature was potentially liberating [in the view of Louis Kampf], provided it was set within a living context close to daily life and removed from its sacrosanct place in the great tradition. ‘In spite of our academic merchants, literature is not a commodity, but the sign of a creative act which expresses personal, social, and historical needs. As such it constantly undermines the status quo.’ The task of the radical critic was to destroy received dogmas and procedures, letting literature be an instrument of agitation and resistance and a force for freedom and genuine liberation. ‘As members of the educated middle class, we must learn that our words should discredit our own culture. Those of us who are literary intellectuals and teachers ought to illustrate in our work that the arts are not alone available to those who are genteel…’.”

–Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s (Chapter Thirteen: “Leftist Criticism from the 1960s to the 1980s”)

(1990) “I start with the recognition that we are at war, and that war is not simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and socialist camp over which economic/political/social arrangement will have hegemony in the world. It’s not just the battle over turf and who has the right to utilize resources for whomsoever’s benefit. The war is also being fought over the truth: what is the truth about human nature, about the human potential? My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth. That ain’t easy. There are so few truth-speaking traditions in this society in which the myth of ‘Western civilization’ has claimed the allegiance of so many. We have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works, that it releases the Spirit and that it is a joyous thing. We live in a part of the world, for example, that equates criticism with assault, that equates social responsibility with naïve idealism, that defines the unrelenting pursuit of knowledge and wisdom as fanaticism.” “I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to tell the truth about people’s lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block…” “It would be dishonest, though, to end my comments there. First and foremost I write for myself….”

–Toni Cade Bambara, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.)

(1990) “I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, ‘Why don’t they?’ And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably to social change. So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”

–Audre Lorde, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.)

(1993) “The 1930s literary radicals, I have demonstrated, brought various considerations to bear in their definitions of proletarian literature. There was, however, no party line on the subject. As Jack Conroy remarked retrospectively about the debates over what proletarian literature was, ‘We used to talk about it endlessly and never arrived at any definite conclusion’…. Even if writers did not feel bound to one or another definition of proletarian literature, [certain] critics argue, they felt obliged to conform to a rigid didacticism involving stock characters, formulaic plots, and a programmatic optimism. Art had to be a weapon and, as such, an instrument of propaganda. But since art and propaganda are antagonistically opposed, left-wing didactic literature was condemned to mouthing slogans and preaching conversion to the cause.

    “In future chapters we will have the opportunity to determine whether proletarian novels were in fact as formulaic and predictable as their detractors charge. What I shall argue in this chapter is that there is very limited validity to the charge that routinely accompanies accusations of political straitjacketing—namely, that Third-Period Marxist critics, as mouthpieces for the party line, sought to impose a specifically propagandistic view of literature upon the writers in the party orbit. I shall show that left-wing literary commentators only rarely promoted the notion that literary works should impart or promote specific tenets of party doctrine; insofar as the critics had a coherent aesthetic theory, this theory was almost exclusively cognitive and reflectionist rather than agitational and hortatory. Indeed, I shall argue that in certain important ways the American approach to questions of representation and ideology was committed—as was the dominant tendency in all Marxist criticism of this period, Soviet and European—to a number of premises about literary form that were bourgeois rather than revolutionary. Literary radicals might applaud proletarian novelists whose works encouraged revolutionary class partisanship. Gold hailed Conroy as ‘a proletarian shock-trooper whose weapon is literature’; the novelist Ruth McKenney wrote Isidor Schneider that his From the Kingdom of Necessity was ‘a more powerful weapon than any tear gas the other side can manufacture.’ In general, however, commentators, critics and novelists alike, held back from theorizing—let alone legislating—any of the representational maneuvers specific to this literary weaponry. Their espoused commitment to the notion that all literature is propaganda for one side or another in the class struggle was countered by a deep antipathy to viewing proletarian literature as propagandistic in any of its distinctive rhetorical strategies. The 1930s radicals never fully repudiated the bourgeois counterposition of art to propaganda: to them, proletarian literature contained very different values and assumptions, but as literature, it was just like any other kind of writing. Ironically, to the extent that they were prescriptive in advocating any given set of aesthetic principles, the Marxist critics urged a largely depoliticized conception of mimetic practice that coexisted only uneasily with many of the values and ideas that they congratulated writers for articulating in their texts” (129-131).

–Barbara Foley, “Art or Propaganda,” in Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941

(1995) “Ernest Hemingway, thinking of himself, as always, once said that all American literature grew out of Huck Finn. It undoubtedly would have been better for American literature, and American culture, if our literature had grown out of one of the best-selling novels of all time, another American work of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which for its portrayal of an array of thoughtful, autonomous, and passionate black characters leaves Huck Finn far behind… The power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the power of brilliant analysis married to great wisdom of feeling. Stowe never forgets the logical end of any relationship in which one person is the subject and the other is the object. No matter how the two people feel, or what their intentions are, the logic of the relationship is inherently tragic and traps both parties until the false subject/object relationship is ended. Stowe’s most oft-repeated and potent representation of this inexorable logic is the forcible separation of family members, especially of mothers from children…. The grief and despair [the] women display is no doubt what T.S. Eliot was thinking of when he superciliously labeled Uncle Tom’s Cabin ‘sensationalist propaganda,’ but, in fact, few critics in the nineteenth century ever accused Stowe of making up or even exaggerating such stories. One group of former slaves who were asked to comment on Stowe’s depiction of slave life said that she had failed to portray the very worst, and Stowe herself was afraid that if she told some of what she had heard from escaped slaves and other informants during her eighteen years in Cincinnati, the book would be too dark to find any readership at all… One of Stowe’s most skillful techniques is her method of weaving a discussion of slavery into the dialogue of her characters…. Stowe also understands that the real root of slavery is that it is profitable as well as customary…. The very heart of nineteenth-century American experience and literature, the nature and meaning of slavery, is finally what Twain cannot face in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn…. Why, then, we may ask, did Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for all its power and popularity, fail to spawn American literature? Fail, even, to work as a model for how to draw passionate, autonomous and interesting black literary characters? Fail to keep the focus of the American literary imagination on the central dilemma of the American experience: race? …The real loss, though, is not to our literature but to our culture and ourselves, because we have lost the subject of how the various social groups who may not escape to the wilderness are to get along in society; and, in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the hard-nosed, unsentimental dialogue about race that we should have been having since before the Civil War. Obviously, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is no more the last word on race relations than The Brothers Karamazov or David Copperfield is on any number of characteristically Russian or English themes and social questions…. When Stowe’s voice, a courageously public voice—as demonstrated by the public arguments about slavery that rage throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin—fell silent in our culture and was replaced by the secretive voice of Huck Finn, who acknowledges Jim only when they are alone on the raft together out in the middle of the big river, racism fell out of the public world and into the private one where whites think it really is but blacks know it really isn’t.” “Should Huckleberry Finn be taught in the schools? The critics of the Propaganda Era laid the groundwork for the universal inclusion of the book in school curriculums by declaring it great. Although they predated the current generation of politicized English professors, this was clearly a political act…. I would rather my children read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, even though it is far more vivid in its depiction of cruelty than Huck Finn, and this is because Stowe’s novel is clearly and unmistakably a tragedy. No whitewash, no secrets, but evil, suffering, imagination, endurance, and redemption—just like life. Like little Eva, who eagerly but fearfully listens to the stories of the slaves that her family tries to keep from her, our children want to know what is going on, what has gone on, and what we intend to do about it. If ‘great’ literature has any purpose, it is to help us face up to our responsibilities instead of enabling us to avoid them once again by lighting out for the territory.”

–Jane Smiley, “Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s ‘Masterpiece,’ Harpers, December 1995

(1999) Barbara Kingsolver’sThe Bellwether Prize for Fiction: “In support of a literature for social change”

“Fiction has a unique capacity to bring difficult issues to a broad readership on a personal level, creating empathy in a reader’s heart for the theoretical stranger. Its capacity for invoking moral and social responsibility is enormous. Throughout history, every movement toward a more peaceful and humane world has begun with those who imagined the possibilities. The Bellwether Prize seeks to support the imagination of humane possibilities.