Abstract

This dissertation analyzes post-structuralist theses concerning the literary work's potential for political critique and impact. By placing contemporary claims as to the inevitably oppressive or ineffectual character of the literary work next to the texts and reception of novels by John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell and Richard Wright, I examine whether such claims can account for the political achievements of actual literary works. Locating in Dos Passos's U.S.A., Farrell's Studs Lonigan and Wright's Native Son instances of an effective oppositional literature, I argue against the post-structuralist position and for a reconsideration of the Sartrean assertion of the "negative," and thus potentially critical and oppositional, agency of writers and readers, and thus, too, of the literary work. In using a particular case study as a corrective both for recent theory and for the excesses of Sartre's own arguments for "committed" writing, "Crisis and Dissent" contributes both to on-going critiques of post-structuralism and to recent re-evaluations of Sartre's own literary theory