This dissertation explores how four modernist writers of the 1930s and 1940sWilliam
Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Weltyused their works to present
ways to resist and navigate what they present as the frequently reductive worldview offered by
the culture industry. Faulkner tends to show the culture industry as selling easy answers that
focus on the end result, which allows his characters to approach the culture industry with a
sense of fatalism. To resist this, Faulkner stresses a step-by-step, complex dialectical
understanding of the culture industry, one that shows the fissures in its seemingly
straightforward narratives and allows the reader to see how the narratives of the culture
industry are not totalizing and can be resisted. Richard Wright, with his Native Son (1940), has
written a better piece of mass culture, one that both gives the reader what he wants and helps
show how the pleasures of mass culture are tied to a racist system. More than any of the other
writers Im discussing, Wright courts a wide audience by expertly using the tropes of various
popular forms of the late 1930smovies, crime novels, gothic fiction, newspapers, protest
novelsand then adds an extra layer of analysis that explores how these pieces of mass culture
are not ideologically neutral. One of the protagonists in a Delmore Schwartz story compares a movie to the Oracle at Delphi, which gave prophesies enigmatic enough to allow differing
interpretations. The masses in Schwartzs stories approach mass culture looking for simple
entertainment, and thats what they get. The conflicted artist figures who are the protagonists of Schwartzs stories approach mass culture more complexly, and Schwartz shows how an
artistically inclined mind can find much of value in mass culture if he knows what to look for.
Eudora Welty, finally, shows mass culture as something that can help compound a sense of
(frequently female) alienation. For Welty, it is small moments of emotional connection that
allow people to find a way out of the totalizing system of mass culture.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-06302010-155903 |
| Date | 01 July 2010 |
| Creators | Dupuy, Jason |
| Contributors | Moreland, Richard, Costello, Brannon, Freedman, Carl, Michie, Elsie, Weber, Christopher |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-06302010-155903/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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