| Willa Cather argued that culture is not a means to an end--it has no end; she insisted that it does not have a "use value," that it cannot be accounted for, and that it can only be understood outside the means-end paradigm. Removed especially from politics and economics, culture, she maintained, was abstract, pure, not for reason or profit. Cather was not alone in her opposition to result-oriented thinking. This dissertation demonstrates that in the early twentieth-century the pragmatic values of purpose, action, application and social reform threatened such a view, challenging the Arnoldian idea that "culture" (like art) is by nature disinterested. Arguing that Cather's views are exemplary of a broader struggle at this time to resist the threat of industrialism by entrenching the authority of a genteel (cultural) aesthetic, I examine an unmined tension in America between "abstract" and "practical" pursuits, a tension that became increasingly visible in the twentieth-century as science gained authoritative momentum and began to offer unprecedented possibilities for commercial and industrial enterprise. Focusing on the fiction and essays of Willa Cather, novels by Frank Norris and Ralph Ellison, and the ideas of influential intellectuals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and John Dewey, I retrieve both the controversy over the emergence of science as a commercial endeavor and the debates over the definition of education, as it became more responsive to the needs of a practical society, and contend that the erosion of the classic distinction between "culture" and utility--ideal and practical--meant the disruption of ethnic, racial and class distinction and the development of a new cultural aesthetic.; Evincing a commitment to the distinction of culture and commerce in several different disciplines, I maintain that it is at the heart of the idea of aesthetics, which I characterize in opposition to the idea of Democracy. I pay close attention to the rise of pragmatism (and its challenge to philosophical idealism), and to Dewey's insistence that the principal obstacle to Democracy was the powerful alliance of class privilege with philosophies of education (beginning with Plato) that sharply divided mind and body, theory and practice, culture and utility. Especially pernicious among educators, Dewey believed, was the distinction between culture and utility, a dualism, he wrote, "itself imbedded in a social dualism: the distinction between the working class and the leisure class." Following this problem into mid-century, I find that in Invisible Man (1952), the legacy of these questions surfaces in regard to race. My analysis of this text links it to the ideas of Du Bois, who explicitly addressed racial hierarchy in terms of the practical/cultural split. I chart the course of this dichotomy in American American history by looking at the influence of Du Bois on Ellison, concluding that Du Bois' idea of "higher aims" is indeed at the heart of Ellison's aesthetic theory, though Ellison attempts to reconcile the two historically separate realms, a position which indicates the tenacious legacy of pragmatism. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
