Proletarian culture has had a difficult time in the United States.  The same forces that attempted to stifle its development during the period mentioned in Foley’s title have been largely responsible for writing its history.  Perhaps I should be more accurate and say writing it out of literary history.  This entire body of work, and the philosophical ideas regarding literature associated with it, have been airbrushed out of American literary history like Trotsky in the notorious photo archive purge. In this study, Foley attempts to excavate in American history to recover this manifestation of working class life, and she succeeds. 

          Foley’s book is divided into two parts: part one deals with the historical and political context in which proletarian literature operated during the depression, and part two deals with the strengths and limitations of particular literary forms as vehicles for the expression of revolutionary ideas.  In part one, Foley discusses the anti-communist movement’s influence on literary history, the major influences on American literary radicalism, and debates within the movement regarding the definition of proletarian literature, partisanship in literature, race and gender. All of these discussions are based on extensive archival research and close reading of proletarian literature.  In part two, Foley critically examines the fictional autobiography, the bildungsroman, the social novel, and the collective novel as possible vehicles for revolutionary expression using the tools of narratology as developed by Gerard Genette. Again, this section is richly documented from the pages of proletarian novels, and analyzed with an eye to the present.            

        This study comes in the context of two other movements in literary studies against which it should be laid out in order to comprehend its true power.  These movements are the so-called new criticism, and the cultural studies movement.  As different as these movements may appear, this book offers a serious challenge to both of them.  If we view the new criticism as a high-culture formalist movement which focuses on the aesthetic autonomy of literature, and cultural studies as an (unthinking) affirmation of “popular culture” in the light of a rejection of the work of critics of mass culture like Adorno and Marcuse, we can imagine the type of contempt with which practitioners of these hegemonic schools of American reading would approach the proletarian literature that Foley studies.  We can imagine the simultaneous cries of ‘elitism’ and ‘propaganda’ that these dominant strands of American literary education would offer as arguments against it.  

         It seems that with the end of the cold war the “claims” of the new critics and cold-war liberals have lost something.  It is becoming increasingly evident that the principle of their claims’ coherence was not strictly rational.  With the end of the cold war, it is possible to answer these claims with fact, to displace the ideological taboo placed on these novels and these aesthetic values with reasoned historical and aesthetic argumentation.  In this study, Foley returns to the documentary history of the proletarian literary movement and uses the evidence of the archives to refute the slogans and myths propagated by the movements’ critics over the years.  Her arguments attack the central dogmas of the new criticism, as well as its defined ‘heresies,’ but they also indirectly destabilize the legitimacy of cultural studies insofar as it relies on certain inherited valuations of radical culture.  In particular, the existence of an aesthetically legitimate autonomous proletarian culture destabilizes the notion of market-driven cultural democracy that underlies cultural studies’ affirmation of what it calls “popular culture.”  As Thomas Frank puts it, summarizing the work of Herbert Gans, a representative articulation of the worldview of the cultural studies movement:

Gans began the book by rejecting the idea “that popular culture is simply imposed on the audience from above,” that a malign culture industry is able to tell us what to think. In fact, he argues, audiences have the power to demand and receive, through the medium of the market, the culture of their choosing from the entertainment industry. Then, in what would eventually become the trademark gesture of academic cultural studies, Gans hammered the critics of the entertainment industry as the real villains, as “elitist” nabobs who are “unhappy with [recent] tendencies toward cultural democracy” and who obnoxiously assume they know what is best for the world. (New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right, pg. 2)

          If the proletarian literary movement is unbound, if this repressed element is set free, it makes this notion of market-driven cultural democracy laughable.  As long as the correct portion of the history of twentieth century American literature is suppressed, the cultural studies practitioners can pose as literary radicals who affirm the underdog and defend the working person against the incursions of the elites.  After reading Foley’s work, it becomes impossible to respect the authenticity of “popular culture,” and more importantly, it becomes possible to make rigorous historical arguments against those who would defend this most objectionable tenet of the cultural studies worldview.  She gives us a point of departure; she restores the rest of the historical record: working class people have produced culture that was not sold to them by an entertainment industry, but was an integrated part of their political aspirations and everyday experience.

        As important as this work is to theoretical practitioners in the modern literary critical environment, it is equally important to aspiring left-wing artists, novelists, dramatists and poets.  Many people socialized in neo-liberal culture who feel revolutionary stirrings in their guts do not know where to turn in order to gain from a history of experimentation by like-minded forebears. Foley consciously seeks to remedy this problem in her study.  She does not approach this history in a memorializing way that would enshrine the literary radicals of the 1930’s as saints or demi-gods beyond which the modern aspirant has no appeal, but she approaches it critically, astutely noting room for improvement, impasses and failures.   She shows us some of what has been done, and points us to the sources where we can investigate this much-neglected history for ourselves.   

                                                                                                            Edward Calamia                                                                                                                                                         Hunter College

Works Cited

Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Frank, Thomas. New Consensus for Old Cultural Studies from Left to Right. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002.