Literary Criticism of Dreiser

Curiously, however, the textual subject field of An American Tragedy, which might have been perceived during Dreiser's lifetime as presently relevant affable criticism, can, some 75 years by and by the novel's first appearance now be seen less as substantial for what it says as for how it came to prominence. Or, to put it another mien, the manifest text can be interpreted not only as a literary artifact of social, psychological, and emotional import only also as a latent social put down of the pulse of progressive American political and social determine and advocacy of the period, as well as of the literary/ artistic milieu in which it was nurtured. If it is accurate to say that the novel is " close" the effect of morally and ethically superficial and bankrupt determine on an ordinary individual, it seems equally accurate to say that contemporary critical interest in the novel stems from what it seems to say intimately the values Dreiser brought to the novelistic project. The evidence of recent critical treatment of An American Tragedy is that the context for the novel is equally as important to contemporary readers as the content of it. Indeed, t

From one point of view, then, the critic, not the text, which is really just slavish object, is at the center of the critical enterprise. What comes across as roughly important roughly that enterprise is that the critic be seen as the agent of insight; whether the insight itself can be substantiated with unique(predicate) reference to text or to the facts of the author's life is evidently of auxiliary importance in this kind of criticism. According to Strychacz, who deals with a hail of different texts, An American Tragedy is only one physical exercise of a novel that has been appropriated for a critical agenda that has as its subject what the text reveals to the highest degree the context in which it appeared and what it indicates about the context in which it is being examined.

This is not to say that the content of An American Tragedy is irrelevant.

Where it is relevant, however, the focus of the criticism is on aspects of the text that can be used to illustrate or excuse context. Rhodes sees An American Tragedy and Wilson's Merton of the Movies, which both appeared in the 1920s, as oddly useful with regard to what could be called the macro-context of American cultural concerns. He explains what he refers to as the "modern subject" (385-6) of mass American culture in terms of the difficulties that Americans comprising the masses--i.e., the proletariat looking for a way to gain entry into bourgeois comfort--have in adapting to the crack between the seductive power of the lineaments of comfort in frequent culture and the sharply unequal access to enjoying them. The experience of social inequality, whether economic, racial, or educational, is decisive and all too real for most(prenominal) people, and Rhodes's view is that An American Tragedy helped form a prototypic literary treatment of this fundamental fact. Further to this point, when Galbraith describes "reading about the rich" (1) in a commentary on the way affluence is treated in American literature, an important accept of the argument is tha
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