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Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, 2005.. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 463-480). Also available in electronic format on the World Wide Web. Access restricted to users affiliated with the licensed institutions.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 231-248). Also available in electronic format on the World Wide Web. Access restricted to users affiliated with the licensed institutions.

Inaug.-diss.--Greifswald. / Lebenslauf. At head of title: Englisch. "Literaturverzeichnis": p. [49]-50.

This dissertation examines representations of the distinction between new and old money in 1920s American novels. New money is earned or acquired, while old money is inherited. The distinction itself reveals the ethos out of which it emerges; the sources of money only become important when money appears to be on the loose, circulating, and ending up in unpredictable hands. In the context of increased access to liquidity, the distinction of new and old money expresses a conflict over social legitimacy and the definition of an American elite. This concern with legitimation, in turn, gives rise to a set of binaries pertaining to social position, including the distinction of born versus inherited, authentic versus artificial, and historical versus fictional. I argue that representations of money, or “money stories,” become a legible discourse of social legitimation in this period. Bringing together texts typically segmented by the modes of naturalism, realism, and modernism, I reveal the dominance of this legitimating discourse and, in particular, the centrality of the distinction between new and old money across novels of the period. The project consists of readings articulating the distinction between new and old money. Chapter one situates Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street and Babbitt within the context of 1920s ambivalence around the frontier myth, arguing that, in Lewis, the problem of the loss of land is the problem of the loss of a legitimating ground for a moneyed elite. Chapter two reads Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as a study in the dialectical relationship of new and old money, revealing old money’s account of genealogical inheritance as a carefully constructed response to new money’s power of purchase. Chapter three argues that new money is a particularly rich site for fiction in F. Scott Fitzgerald, who continually restaged the confrontation between old money’s silent, assumed history and new money’s profusion of fictional accounts of its past. Chapter four treatsJohn Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy as a reflection on the biographical form in the context of liquidity, taking stock of the money story, that peculiar genre of legitimation so prevalent in this period’s novels.

<p> By exploring how Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne each write about art, I articulate a little-discussed aesthetic tradition centered around the aesthetic of effect. This tradition works to connect romantic ideas about the author with sentimental emphasis on the need for affective art.</p>

<p> Despite Henry James&rsquo;s reputation as a novelist of upper class manners, many critics have argued that his work also contains well-grounded criticism of capitalism and consumer culture. An even larger number of writers have analyzed James&rsquo;s idiosyncratic style, characterized by ambiguity and abstractness. Where these two analytic approaches overlap, the area examined in this dissertation, James makes a deeper critique of capitalism&rsquo;s redefinition of human purpose and its reification of the human mind and consciousness. James suggests, through his ambiguous and abstract language, that open-ended language which rejects concrete and conceptual meaning can gesture toward a space in which people can reclaim their full humanity and reject the reification of life &ndash; a space that is non-reified. Moreover, this non-reified space, while it can help an individual redefine her subjectivity, is brought to fruition when people share deeply intersubjective connections. By applying to four James novels the Marxist elaboration of commodification and reification by Georg Luk&aacute;cs, the detailed analysis of Jamesian grammar and syntax by Seymour Chatman, and the phenomenological discussions of language and intersubjectivity by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as the views of Gertrude Stein on the importance of allowing linguistic space that is not already filled with meaning, this dissertation finds James&rsquo;s gesture toward a space in which people can be fully human, experience each other as fully human, and rediscover language as a powerful force for mutual creation of the next moment and, from there, the world.</p>