Pub Date : 2018-06-05DOI: 10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0005
Stephen Schryer
This chapter explores literary responses to the late 1960s crisis in participatory professionalism, provoked by the period’s race riots and by conservatives’ successful appropriation of liberal poverty discourse. The chapter focuses on two texts that address the Community Action Program: Joyce Carol Oates’s them and Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. While these texts voice opposing political positions, both distrust white liberal efforts to speak for the ghetto, drawing on traditions of urban writing (naturalism and literary journalism) that resist the process imperative to break down barriers between author, audience, and lower-class subject matter. At the same time, both writers complicate their literary objectivity by incorporating aspects of the very participatory professionalism they seek to delimit.
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Pub Date : 2018-06-05DOI: 10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0002
Stephen Schryer
This chapter puts the Beat writer Jack Kerouac in conversation with 1950s sociologists and psychologists interested in juvenile delinquency. These social scientists used the delinquent to develop ideas that would culminate in the class culture paradigm of the 1960s. Kerouac’s fiction prefigures this paradigm, drawing on the work of Oswald Spengler to distinguish between lower-class minority and middle-class white cultures in the United States. In autobiographical novels like Maggie Cassidy, On the Road, and Dr. Sax, Kerouac imagines the delinquent as a self-divided figure, alienated from the traditional lower class and unable to adapt to the new demands of the rising professional class. His version of process art replicates this division, offering its readers a failed synthesis of middlebrow and avant-garde literature.
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Pub Date : 2018-06-05DOI: 10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0004
Stephen Schryer
This chapter focuses on the Chicano writer and lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, whose novels, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and Revolt of the Cockroach People, chart his transformation into a radical lawyer for Los Angeles’s Brown Power Movement. Acosta began his career with Legal Services, a network of War on Poverty–funded Legal Aid offices. When he turned to movement activism, he radicalized Legal Services’ demand that lawyers use their expertise to challenge laws that work against the interest of their lower-class clients. This demand became central to Acosta’s version of process art. At the same time, Acosta’s work replicates gender biases that ran throughout the War on Poverty. His political turn entailed his rejection of welfare mothers as clients in favor of militant young men—a turn that paralleled the War on Poverty’s focus on male delinquents.
这一章主要关注奇卡诺作家兼律师奥斯卡·泽塔·阿科斯塔,他的小说《一只棕色水牛的自传》和《蟑螂人的反抗》描绘了他如何转变为洛杉矶棕色权力运动的激进律师。阿科斯塔的职业生涯始于法律服务,这是一个由“向贫困宣战”资助的法律援助办公室网络。当他转向运动激进主义时,他激进化了法律服务公司的要求,即律师利用他们的专业知识挑战不利于下层客户利益的法律。这一需求成为阿科斯塔的过程艺术版本的核心。与此同时,阿科斯塔的工作复制了贯穿于“向贫困宣战”的性别偏见。他在政治上的转变导致他拒绝把福利母亲作为客户,转而支持激进的年轻男性——这一转变与“向贫困宣战”(War on Poverty)对男性罪犯的关注相一致。
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Pub Date : 2018-06-05DOI: 10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0007
Stephen Schryer
This chapter focuses on Philip Roth’s late 1990s novel, The Human Stain, arguing that the novel draws an analogy between the university and the Democratic Party. In early War on Poverty–era novels like Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth developed an antiprocess conception of art and welfare politics, one that conceived of works of art and public institutions as products that require audiences to appreciate them on their own terms. In The Human Stain, Roth extends this conception to the postmodern academy, using it to criticize multicultural education and affirmative action. Linking the university and New Deal liberal coalition, Roth insists that both are under assault by cultural and ideological outsiders. This analogy leads Roth to embrace a strategic conservatism, one that echoes the politics of Bill Clinton, whose impeachment trial recurs throughout The Human Stain.
本章主要关注菲利普·罗斯(Philip Roth)在上世纪90年代末的小说《人性的污点》(The Human Stain),认为这部小说将大学与民主党进行了类比。在《向贫困宣战》(War on poverty)时代的早期小说中,比如波特诺伊的《抱怨》(Complaint),罗斯提出了一种艺术和福利政治的反过程概念,他认为艺术作品和公共机构是需要观众以自己的方式欣赏的产品。在《人性的污点》中,罗斯将这一概念扩展到后现代学院,用它来批判多元文化教育和平权行动。罗斯将大学和新政自由主义联盟联系起来,坚称两者都受到文化和意识形态局外人的攻击。这种类比使罗斯接受了一种战略保守主义,这种保守主义与比尔·克林顿(Bill Clinton)的政治相呼应,他的弹劾审判在《人类的污点》(Human Stain)中反复出现。
{"title":"Who Belongs in the University?","authors":"Stephen Schryer","doi":"10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on Philip Roth’s late 1990s novel, The Human Stain, arguing that the novel draws an analogy between the university and the Democratic Party. In early War on Poverty–era novels like Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth developed an antiprocess conception of art and welfare politics, one that conceived of works of art and public institutions as products that require audiences to appreciate them on their own terms. In The Human Stain, Roth extends this conception to the postmodern academy, using it to criticize multicultural education and affirmative action. Linking the university and New Deal liberal coalition, Roth insists that both are under assault by cultural and ideological outsiders. This analogy leads Roth to embrace a strategic conservatism, one that echoes the politics of Bill Clinton, whose impeachment trial recurs throughout The Human Stain.","PeriodicalId":166106,"journal":{"name":"Maximum Feasible Participation","volume":"310 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124414547","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-05DOI: 10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0006
Stephen Schryer
This chapter explores the persistence of community action as an ideal in post-1960s black feminist fiction, focusing on Alice Walker’s Meridian and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Both writers began their careers as social workers associated with War on Poverty programs; both were also influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s version of community action, implemented during the 1964 Freedom Summer. In their novels, Walker and Bambara explore the legacy of the civil rights movement, focusing on intraracial class divisions that community action was supposed to suture. In both novels, these divisions turn out to be ineradicable, and their persistence marks the Southern folk aesthetic—the influential version of process art that Walker, Bambara, and other black feminist writers created in the 1970s.
{"title":"Civil Rights and the Southern Folk Aesthetic","authors":"Stephen Schryer","doi":"10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the persistence of community action as an ideal in post-1960s black feminist fiction, focusing on Alice Walker’s Meridian and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Both writers began their careers as social workers associated with War on Poverty programs; both were also influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s version of community action, implemented during the 1964 Freedom Summer. In their novels, Walker and Bambara explore the legacy of the civil rights movement, focusing on intraracial class divisions that community action was supposed to suture. In both novels, these divisions turn out to be ineradicable, and their persistence marks the Southern folk aesthetic—the influential version of process art that Walker, Bambara, and other black feminist writers created in the 1970s.","PeriodicalId":166106,"journal":{"name":"Maximum Feasible Participation","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129016891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-05DOI: 10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0003
Stephen Schryer
This chapter discusses two Black Arts writers who benefited from War on Poverty patronage: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Gwendolyn Brooks. In The System of Dante’s Hell and In the Mecca, the two writers developed distinct versions of participatory art. Like much of Baraka’s Beat-period work, The System of Dante’s Hell thematizes his dissatisfaction with the white counterculture and desire to create art that could connect him with black urban audiences. However, the novel draws on the counterculture’s essentialist conception of lower-class culture in ways that would continue to shape Baraka’s cultural nationalist output of the late 1960s. In contrast, Brooks’s In the Mecca rejects the immersive drama that defines Baraka’s Black Arts. Inspired by her Community Action Program–sponsored work with Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers, the collection insists that minority poets use the resources of poetic form to achieve a calibrated distance from their lower-class subjects.
{"title":"Black Arts and the Great Society","authors":"Stephen Schryer","doi":"10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11126/STANFORD/9781503603677.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses two Black Arts writers who benefited from War on Poverty patronage: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Gwendolyn Brooks. In The System of Dante’s Hell and In the Mecca, the two writers developed distinct versions of participatory art. Like much of Baraka’s Beat-period work, The System of Dante’s Hell thematizes his dissatisfaction with the white counterculture and desire to create art that could connect him with black urban audiences. However, the novel draws on the counterculture’s essentialist conception of lower-class culture in ways that would continue to shape Baraka’s cultural nationalist output of the late 1960s. In contrast, Brooks’s In the Mecca rejects the immersive drama that defines Baraka’s Black Arts. Inspired by her Community Action Program–sponsored work with Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers, the collection insists that minority poets use the resources of poetic form to achieve a calibrated distance from their lower-class subjects.","PeriodicalId":166106,"journal":{"name":"Maximum Feasible Participation","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122935322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}