Professions of Sentiment: Culture, Poverty and the Social Work of American Literature

My dissertation investigates how 20th century American literature contributed to a seismic cultural shift that relocated the site of sentimental feeling and practice from the emotionally expressive individual to the impersonal institutions of the welfare state. Writers from the 1930s to the 1960s imaginatively rehearse how government agencies could perform the emotional work that individual persons once did. These literary efforts to make the procedures of sentimentalism available to impersonal organizations centered on a "new class" of professionals working within the institutions of the welfare state. Specifically, postwar literature sought to create a structure of feeling that united the disparate and heterogeneous professional-managerial class into a sentimental community defined by its relationship to the poor as an object of both feeling and expertise. This dissertation argues that, in the postwar welfare state, feeling and expertise converge into a specialized form of emotional labor that I broadly refer to as "social work," and enumerates the various ways that postwar literature participates in the professionalization of individual sentiment. Tracing the convergences between social work as a form of literary labor and social work as a form of professional labor, this project seeks to situate the caseworker and the welfare bureaucrat not as emblems of the impersonality and soullessness of the welfare state, but as the most recent standard-bearers of a sentimental ethos that stretches back to the reform and literary cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.;By casting the professional as the principal agent of sympathetic feeling, American writers offer a new kind of novelistic aesthetic that combines the sentimental ideals of intersubjectivity and the self-in-relation with modernist values of impersonality and negative capability. This new, ethnographic aesthetic is mobilized in order to rehearse and resolve the professional-managerial class' conflicted relationship to the institutions in which it works. In chapters on James Agee, Harper Lee, James Baldwin and Paule Marshall, I show how novelistic efforts to make the private experience of sentimental feeling available to governmental institutions are emblematic of the professional class' efforts to negotiate its ambivalent position between the ideal of autonomous professional labor and the reality of organizational employment.