“Coalitional Aesthetics” argues that leftist literary works of the 1930s enacted bonds of solidarity across racial, linguistic, and geographic divides, modeling alternative, non-hierarchical modes of social cohesion. Building on Gramsci’s concept of the coalitional, coalitional aesthetics refers to a set of formal characteristics that insist on the specificity of the individual even while emphasizing its belonging to a unified political formation, modeling an organization in which singularities—whether individuals, specific localities, or singular labor contexts—exist within networks of solidarity with other singularities that are both united through a shared goal and yet by definition separate. The dissertation weaves together three interconnected aspects of 30s leftist culture: the field of cultural production, including works of fiction, poetry, drama and reportage; the literary institutions which were integral to their production, such as publishing houses and journals, writers’ circles and congresses, and anthologies; and the theories of social cohesion which undergirded the political formations of such institutions, such as solidarism, corporatism, and syndicalism. The project theorizes the relationship between two oft-cited observations regarding 1930s literature—that it was more politically engaged and also more institutional than literature in other periods—showing that the terms of its political engagement were often mediated through literary institutions, many of which employed organizational models which reflected the alternative social formations they sought to produce.“Coalitional Aesthetics” is the first study to directly address the role of literary intuitions—including writers’ circles, printing presses, congresses, and anthologies—in the leftwing literary output of the 1930s, reformulating our understanding of writers as seemingly disparate as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Nancy Cunard, and Pablo Neruda by situating them within the contexts of their many overlapping institutional commitments. Literary institutions such as the John Reed Clubs (JRC), Richard Wright’s Southside Writers’ Group, the antifascist Congresses for the Defense of Culture, Alexander Trachtenberg’s International Publishers, and Nancy Cunard’s Popular Front anthologies each foregrounded and modeled theories of social cohesion, such as syndicalism, solidarism, and corporatism that underwrote 30s literature. For example, Langston Hughes’s poem, “Wait” (1934), written the year he co-founded the Carmel chapter of the JRC and published in its organ, the Partisan, visually and formally models the horizontal organizational structure of both its parent institution and the alternative society it sought to enact. Cunard and Pablo Neruda’s largely unrecovered Spanish Civil War poetry anthology, Los poetas del mundo defiendel al pueblo español (1937), compiles poems across languages and movements—from Tristan Tzara to W. H. Auden to Nicolás Guillén—to support a singular political cause, just as the Popular Front brought distinct ideological positions into political coalition.

Creator

• Beeber, Matthew

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-9n3k-g075

Subject

• African American studies
• American history
• American literature

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16092
• etdadmin_upload_903227

Keyword

• Langston Hughes
• John Reed Clubs
• Writers Congress
• Nancy Cunard
• International Publishers
• Anthology

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright