Writing from the left: Race, gender, and the critique of representation in the Great Depression

The subject of this dissertation is a form of U.S. Depression-era writing called “proletarian literature.” I argue that its authors' shared commitment to thinking of their work as “proletarian” engages a materialist critique of representational practices common to both the cultural left and the emerging forms of the modern (corporate) capitalist enterprise.; In particular, proletarian writers were responding to attempts on the part of business enterprises to enforce new forms of “scientific management,” which had resulted in a transformation of the labor process such that workers were reduced to a purely physical substance: a fixed capital commodity like real estate or machines. In turn, they sought to lend support to contemporary working-class struggles by producing a kind of writing that would be not only “about” the working class but would be capable of actually embodying working-class experience. That is, they tried in their writing to describe labor's gendered, racial-ethnic embodiment within American capitalist society as constituting the most critical site of revolutionary activity.; I conclude that the most compelling aspect of this kind of writing is that, as writing—and thus as a representational practice—it sought not only to produce a materialist critique of representation as such, but to provide a new form of cultural-political praxis capable of subverting both Marxist and capitalist attempts to contain it. Their concern with questions of representation, corporeality, and history—including gendered, racial, class, and national identities-can therefore be seen as a critical precursor to contemporary theories of postcolonial subjectivity which can assist us in thinking about problems of political agency today.; The dissertation is divided into three parts. An introduction discusses the historical conditions that formed the background for the emergence of the genre of proletarian literature during the Great Depression; the second part, divided into three sections, consists of readings of proletarian fiction and poetry; and a conclusion brings together the insights of the writers treated in part two in order to examine the particular notion of representation that their writing critiqued.