Rewriting the American Work Narrative: Modernist Literature and the Paradox of Patriotic Labor

My dissertation, “Rewriting the American Work Narrative: Modernist Literature and the Paradox of Patriotic Labor,” analyzes depictions of work in novels and plays from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to consider the ways American literature reckons with the existential relationship between work and the self. Inspired by Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism”—“a relation,” Berlant explains, that “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”—I explore the paradoxical narrative of American capitalism that espouses devotion to work as the definitive means of formalizing individuality, even as it often undermines that aim. In this regard, my research looks past the material conditions of work to focus on American literature’s theorization of work in the early twentieth century and engages post-work theories that propose analyzing labor in capitalism rather than capitalism from the standpoint of labor. By engaging a range of authors—including William Dean Howells, Edward Bellamy, Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston—my dissertation presents work as a node through which numerous facets of American life intersect and thus extends the relevance of my research to consider work’s role in shaping our understanding of race, nationality, and gender.