Book Project 

“Abandoned Subjects: The Sociality of Survival in Modern American Literature”

Louis Althusser argued that we become subjects by being “hailed” by another; for Emmanuel Levinas, it is by “facing” the other. But what kind of subject is produced by being turned away from? This monograph draws on American literature from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression to fashion a theory of abandonment. I use the term to designate both a material reality and a conceptual framework; abandonment names what remains unincorporated into the governing economic, political, gender and racial logic. This study is, therefore, particularly interested in literary representations of poverty, homelessness, forms of working-class labor, and the work that race and gender do within these conditions of existence. My approach arises from the Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, and biopolitical theories that have sought not only to account for the inequitable distribution of resources but also to confront the deeper problem of dependency on recognition within injurious power structures and hierarchies.

Scholars in fields such as Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies have used the language of “recovery” while calling attention to previously neglected minority literatures and epistemologies. This monograph asks how the literature of abandonment also resists such recovery projects, as it rebuffs the practice of seeking recognition within a dominant structure of power; rather, abandonment brings to light the spatial practice of the subject’s struggle to reinvent these structures by inhabiting spaces typically deemed uninhabitable. Additionally, contemporary theorists who write on practices of endurance posit the subject as a product of biopolitical power. While the novels I study portray practices of endurance that elude such interdiction, their authors nevertheless remain invested in theorizing the possibilities of the subject for imagining modes of existence beyond survival. “Inhabiting”—discovering forms of being where one’s being is impossible or illicit—produces a specifically abandoned subject and, by extension, alternative socioeconomic and political structures. This study engages, therefore, with the question of community formation, asking how relationships are negotiated within networks of abandonment formed in particular spaces and across populations.

Bridging socioeconomic history with thematic readings and a study of literary form, this monograph examines the following problem of abandonment: that the creative exploitation of concealed and obscured spaces by dispossessed individuals is necessary in the first place because these individuals are already impoverished. I argue that these novels foreground the work of literature in negotiating this dilemma and, by extension, in negotiating the deep ambivalence underlying these texts toward the representational structures that legitimize or delegitimize modes of being. The driving question of this study is, then, how can the concept of abandonment allow us to address its subject without absorbing it into an injurious system of evaluation or the neoliberal discourse of recognition?

The period of literary production on which I focus is bracketed by two decades that witnessed both intensified dispossession and the increasingly organized demand among the dispossessed for representation. Drawing on texts that ultimately interrogate and often rebuff this politics of repossession and distributive justice, I trace, in five chapters and a coda, depictions of abandonment from the techno-economic development of “uninhabitable” landscapes to alternative forms of inhabiting abandoned or failed spaces. Gender is central to each of the texts I discuss because of the historically disproportionately vulnerable economic and political status of women, as the traditionally abandoned, left to wait or domesticate.

A Swamp in Name Only: Becoming-Geographic and the Archive in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece

Chapter one, “A Swamp in Name Only: Becoming-Geographic and the Archive in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Quest of the Silver Fleece” illustrates how black literary production in the Jim Crow era grappled with the necessity of seeking representation shaped by an historically dispossessory archive. I show that in Silver Fleece (1911) the reinvention of swampland by an abandoned black woman into a farmable and habitable settlement constitutes a form of recovery that would secure representation for black tenant farmers. At the same time, I argue, this act of recovery, much like the multigeneric and multivocal form of the novel itself, ultimately exceeds the forms of representation that, for Du Bois, both makes black subjectivity possible and seeks to regulate it.  

Specters of Debt: Hauntological Relation and the Foreclosing of the Frontier in Willa Cather’s Prairie Trilogy

Chapter two develops on my critique of agricultural settlement by addressing the extra-representational figures who are incapacitated and made insolvent within the operations of settler-colonial capitalism. “Specters of Debt: Hauntological Relation and the Foreclosing of the Frontier in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Ántonia” examines the grieving in Cather’s prairie fiction of those who have been culled from the prairie as a result of insolvency. In O Pioneers! (1913), I argue, such grieving facilitates the interruption of the production, on a closed frontier, of a populace determined by remote and abstract financial technologies. Cather thus not only imagines ethical and what I call, after Derrida, hauntological relation toward spectral and otherwise marginalized figures; her aesthetic also attempts, particularly in My Ántonia (1917), to reconstitute forms of subjectivity on which indebtedness otherwise forecloses.  

Song of the Poor: The Aesthetic of Habitat in Anzia Yezierska’s Arrogant Beggar

Shifting to an examination of urban poverty, chapter three takes up Anzia Yezierska’s rebuke of settlement houses and philanthropic reform in two of her novels. “Song of the Poor: The Aesthetic of Habitat in Anzia Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements and Arrogant Beggar” argues that the romantic and social abandonments of the female protagonists of Yezierska’s first and third novels (published in 1922 and 1927 respectively) prompt their turn away from a politics of recognition that relies on the construction of the worthy poor to instead develop a class-consciousness that obscures the boundary between necessity and luxury.  

Abandoned Being: Ontological Repossession in Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl

Continuing my inquiry into the literary critique of uplift, chapter four argues that Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl (1939; 1978) employs a vocabulary of “being” to challenge the sentimental rhetoric of uplift. The resulting discovery by women of forms of being within precarious living conditions constitutes an ontological repossession through which Le Sueur imagines alternative feminist socioeconomic structures and dislocates sentimentalism’s investment in the home by adapting its forms to female labor and motherhood among the poor and homeless.

The coda of the monograph shifts away from a focus on inhabiting abandonment as a feminist practice to a broader examination of networks of abandonment in the documentary accounts of the Great Migration in Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941) and Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy’s They Seek a City (1945). The monograph thus concludes by reassessing the study’s narrative arc from the economic development of rural landscapes to noncompliant modes of occupying urban housing.