Fantasies of the new class: Ideologies of professionalism in post-World War II American fiction

"Fantasies of the New Class" examines the terms through which U.S. writers and critics imagined a new and distinctly literary model of professionalism in the years after World War II. According to this model---as it was professed by writers like John Crowe Ransom, Lionel Trilling, Ralph Ellison, Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow---the newfound institutions of the welfare state needed a "new class" of university-educated knowledge workers possessed of a heightened moral and cultural sensibility---a sensibility understood to require aesthetic modes of thinking. These writers imagined that the new class would embrace the non-instrumental values embodied in modernist literature and use them to check the rationalism of bourgeois society. In arguing thusly, they defined their work against the social sciences, which they claimed embodied the technical model of new class agency that their aesthetics counteracted. However, they paralleled a paradigm shift within the social sciences themselves, which also imagined the new class as a cohort of culturally enlightened experts committed to non-rational values and beliefs. Hence, contrary to the view of Cold War writers as embattled and elitist aesthetes, "Fantasies of the New Class" demonstrates the extent to which their modernist aesthetics served a trans-disciplinary ideal of public service. This project also demonstrates how this ideal influenced the next generation of political writers---exemplified by Marge Piercy and Ursula K. Le Guin---who continued to imagine new class agency in non-instrumental terms. As my title indicates, however, this notion of professionalism was a fantasy that disguised the subordination of the new class to market forces. "Fantasies of the New Class" shows how postwar writers and sociologists facilitated this trend by militating their model of professionalism against an older model of professionals as social engineers. Postwar writers thus generated a new conception of literature as simultaneously a vehicle for the new class's cultural instruction and a warning against its managerial ambitions.