Literary Philanthropy: The Pulitzer Prize, Oprah's Book Club, and Contemporary U.S. Fiction

The dissertation examines how the logic of institutional philanthropy shapes the field of contemporary literature. I focus on the Pulitzer Prize and Oprah's Book Club because they reflect the two dominant strains of contemporary social philanthropy. The Pulitzer Prize is rooted in Progressive Era rationalism, a traditional mode of foundation philanthropy that aims to manage contradictions between cultural and economic values by coupling disinterested reflection to procedural bureaucracy. This long-dominant institutional logic has been complemented in recent years by an increasingly popular strain of so-called "philanthrocapitalism," whose impact on the literary field is most strikingly evident in Oprah's Book Club. This second strain of literary philanthropy seeks to resolve conflicts not by managing and coordinating relatively distinct spheres of cultural and economic value, but rather by revealing these values' fundamental, underlying identity: for Oprah, it is not simply that philanthropic institutions can help literature thrive within capitalist markets; rather, the moral, aesthetic, and spiritual values fostered by literature are essential for bringing about truly enduring economic prosperity.;My dissertation contributes to the recent "institutional turn" in literary studies in two significant ways: first, the focus on philanthropy highlights important ethical and aesthetic dimensions of literature that are too often left behind in more sociologically-oriented analyses; and second, I place close textual analysis at the center of my investigation, drawing attention to how individual literary works formulate their own interrogations of the institutional logics that help shape their conditions of production. In my readings of prize-winning and book club-selected novels by Norman Mailer, Marilynne Robinson, Toni Morrison, and Jonathan Franzen, I find self-reflexive explorations of these novels' own implication within the social-philanthropic literary field. Each one expresses in its own way the struggle for literary autonomy amidst this field. Although the philanthropic endeavors of the Pulitzer and Oprah both aim to overcome tensions between cultural and economic values, these novels insist on a set of intractable contradictions at the core of the literary-philanthropic enterprise.