Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought

About the Book

Modern society, Michael Trask argues in this incisive and original book, chose to couch class difference in terms of illicit sexuality. Trask demonstrates how sexual science's concept of erotic perversion mediated the writing of both literary figures and social theorists when it came to the innovative and unsettling social arrangements of the early twentieth century. Trask focuses on the James brothers in a critique of pragmatism and anti-immigrant sentiment, shows the influence of behavioral psychology on Gertrude Stein's work, uncovers a sustained reflection on casual labor in Hart Crane's lyric poetry, and traces the identification of working-class Catholics with deviant passions in Willa Cather's fiction. Finally, Trask examines how literary leftists borrowed the antiprostitution rhetoric of Progressive-era reformers to protest the ascendance of consumerism in the 1920s.Viewing class as a restless and unstable category, Trask contends, American modernist writers appropriated sexology's concept of evasive, unmoored desire to account for the seismic shift in social relations during the Progressive era and beyond. Looking closely at the fraught ideological space between real and perceived class differences, Cruising Modernism discloses there a pervasive representation of sexuality as well.

About the Author :

Michael Trask is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University.

Review :
"Trask argues that queer studies and Marxist studies should not be marginalized because for major writers of the era neither sexuality nor class was special to a coterie, that to 'belong to mass society is always to enter the sphere of the illicit, the perverse, the dirty'-i.e., 'in mass culture everyone is queer.' ... Recommended. Graduate and research collections."-Choice 41:8, April 2004 "This is a smart and provocative book. Michael Trask not only reconceives the links between sexuality and class, but also provides beautiful and often surprising readings to make his case. Working with the concept of desire as articulated by literary figures and social theorists in the early twentieth century, Trask demonstrates the viability of sexuality as a category of both literary and historical analysis."-Joan W. Scott, author of Gender and the Politics of History "In Cruising Modernism, Michael Trask takes two of the most productive sites in current humanities scholarship-modernist studies and queer theory-and combines them in a rich synthesis. Trask allows his readers to see with unprecedented clarity the ways in which perceptions of various kinds of sexual deviance shaped the understanding of class relations. Trask proves his mettle as a first-rate reader and culture critic in his exemplary discussions of the dynamics of sexuality and class in U.S. culture in the scant twenty years between The Wings of the Dove and Manhattan Transfer."-Michael Moon, author of Disseminating Whitman and A Small Boy and Others "Cruising Modernism is a superb book-original, sophisticated, and ambitious. It is intelligent, creatively and rigorously researched, and argued in a manner that strikes an effective balance between the reader's need for summary and synthesis and the desire for novel and risk-taking interpretation."-Jonathan Elmer, Indiana University "This book's examination of how representations of class and sexuality are intertwined in the literature and culture of American modernism is fresh and articulate. I am sure that Cruising Modernism will establish Michael Trask as one of the sharpest thinkers in American literary studies today."-Christopher Nealon, University of California