Synopses & Reviews
Arguing that the sweatshop is as American as apple pie, Laura Hapke surveys over a century and a half of the language, verbal and pictorial, in which the sweatshop has been imagined and its stories told. Not seeking a formal definition of the sort that policymakers are concerned with, nor intending to provide a strict historical chronology, this unique book shows, rather, how the “real” sweatshop has become intertwined with the “invented” sweatshop of our national imagination, and how this mixture of rhetoric and myth has endowed American sweatshops with rich and complex cultural meaning.
Hapke uncovers a wide variety of tales and images that writers, artists, social scientists, reformers, and workers themselves have told about “the shop.” Adding an important perspective to historical and economic approaches, Sweatshop draws on sources from antebellum journalism, Progressive era surveys, modern movies, and anti-sweatshop websites. Illustrated chapters detail how the shop has been a facilitator of assimilation, a promoter of upward mobility, the epitome of exploitation, a site of ethnic memory, a venue for political protest, and an expression of twentieth-century managerial narratives.
An important contribution to the real and imagined history of garment industry exploitation, this book provides a valuable new context for understanding contemporary sweatshops that now represent the worst expression of an unregulated global economy.
Review
andquot;Unfailingly provocative, this is an intelligent book noteworthy for its refusal to be mired in old approaches and its consequent ability to break new ground in the study of both working class fiction and the more general relationship of factory and artistic production.andquot;
Review
andquot;Troublemakers is an entirely commanding and engrossing study of the new forms of workers' control and representation that modern mass-industrial work made availableandmdash;rich and strange in archive, theoretically fresh and creative, historically acute.andquot;
Review
andquot;
Troublemakers is an original take that provides eyeopening insights about different ways acts of resistance by the mass worker, including a refusal to work, may be represented. Scott has added a polished contribution to the list of essential interpretations in the field.andquot;
Review
“This well-conceived, well-executed, and theoretically informed study is wonderfully original—it will appeal not only to literature scholars but also, I should think, to all interested in economics, sociology, literary theory, and film."
Review
"In the wake of the financial collapse and the Occupy movement, Fictions Inc. anatomizes the corporation’s hostile takeover of American culture and argues for fiction's and film’s ability to resist the current order—and demonstrates criticism’s ability to do the same."
Review
andquot;Troublemakers offers fascinating insight into the modes of resistance adopted by the mass industrial worker in America between the 1890s and the 1930s.andquot;
Review
"An incisive study of a hotly-debated term in U.S. poetry today,
American Hybrid Poetics reveals how women’s hybrid forms converse with, and subvert, the gendered tropes of mass media culture. Robbins reveals that women’s hybrid poetics possesses not only a history but—more important—a politics, whose radicalism should no longer be ignored."
Review
“With layers of richness and historicized depth, American Hybrid Poetics makes a distinct contribution to the field. Robbins’s lively writing and strong critical voice are splendid.”
Review
"Fictions Inc is highly topical and fills the existing void in literary criticism, namely in the depiction of the corporation ... this well-informed study shows that literature and culture are not only engaged in racial and sexual politics, but also in the examination and critique of late capitalism."
Synopsis
William Scottandrsquo;s Troublemakers explores how a major change in the nature and forms of working-class power affected novels about U.S. industrial workers in the first half of the twentieth century. With the rise of mechanization and assembly-line labor from the 1890s to the 1930s, these laborers found that they had been transformed into a class of andldquo;massandrdquo; workers who, since that time, have been seen alternately as powerless, degraded victims or heroic, empowered icons who could rise above their oppression only through the help of representative organizations located outside the workplace.
Analyzing portrayals of workers in such novels as Upton Sinclairandrsquo;s The Jungle, Ruth McKenney's Industrial Valley, and Jack Londonandrsquo;s The Iron Heel, William Scott moves beyond narrow depictions of these laborers to show their ability to resist exploitation through their direct actionsandmdash;sit-down strikes, sabotage, and other spontaneous acts of rank-and-file andldquo;troublemakingandrdquo; on the jobandmdash;often carried out independently of union leadership. The novel of the mass industrial worker invites us to rethink our understanding of modern forms of representation through its attempts to imagine and depict workersandrsquo; agency in an environment where it appears to be completely suppressed.
Synopsis
William Scottandrsquo;s Troublemakers explores how a major change in the nature and forms of working-class power affected novels about U.S. industrial workers in the first half of the twentieth century. Analyzing portrayals of workers in such novels as Upton Sinclairandrsquo;s The Jungle, Ruth McKenneyandrsquo;s Industrial Valley, and Jack Londonandrsquo;s The Iron Heel, William Scott moves beyond narrow depictions of these laborers to show their ability to resist exploitation through their direct actionsandmdash;sit-down strikes, sabotage, and other spontaneous acts of rank-and-file andldquo;troublemakingandrdquo; on the jobandmdash;often carried out independently of union leadership.
Synopsis
Fictions Inc. explores how depictions of the corporation in American literature, film, and popular culture have changed over time. Paying particular attention to the rise of neoliberalism, the emergence of biopolitics, and the legal status of “corporate bodies,” Fictions Inc. shows that representations of corporations have come to serve, whether directly or indirectly, as symbols for larger economic concerns often too vast or complex to comprehend.
Synopsis
Fictions Inc. explores how depictions of the corporation in American literature, film, and popular culture have changed over time. Beginning with perhaps the most famous depiction of a corporation—Frank Norris’s
The Octopus—Ralph Clare traces this figure as it shifts from monster to man, from force to “individual,” and from American industry to multinational “Other.” Clare examines a variety of texts that span the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, including novels by Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Joshua Ferris; films such as
Network,
Ghostbusters,
Gung Ho,
Office Space, and
Michael Clayton; and assorted artifacts of contemporary media such as television’s
The Office and the comic strips
Life Is Hell and
Dilbert.
Paying particular attention to the rise of neoliberalism, the emergence of biopolitics, and the legal status of “corporate bodies,” Fictions Inc. shows that representations of corporations have come to serve, whether directly or indirectly, as symbols for larger economic concerns often too vast or complex to comprehend. Whether demonized or lionized, the corporation embodies American anxieties about these current conditions and ongoing fears about the viability of a capitalist system.
Synopsis
American Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poetics—a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies—have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets—Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine—use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt and contest the language of the dominant culture as it is reproduced in genres of mainstream mass culture.
Synopsis
American Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poetics—a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies—have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets—Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine—use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt mainstream American language, literary genres, and visual culture, and expose the ways in which mass culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had a powerfully standardizing impact on the collective American imagination. By forcing encounters between incompatible traditions—consumer culture with the avant-garde, low culture forms with experimental poetics, prose poetry with linguistic subversiveness—these poets bring together radically competing ideologies and highlight their implications for lived experience. Robbins argues that it is precisely because these poets have mixed forms that their work has gone largely unnoticed by leading members and critics in experimental poetry circles.
About the Author
AMY MOORMAN ROBBINS is an assistant professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY, where she specializes in modern and contemporary experimental poetics with emphasis on the work of women poets. She has published critical essays on the work of Gertrude Stein (
Journal of Lesbian Studies), Harryette Mullen (
Contemporary Literature), and Alice Notley (
Pacific Coast Philology).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: From Manchuria to Manchuria Inc.
1 California Dreaming: Twentieth-Century Corporate Fictions at the End of the Frontier
2 “Domo Arigato, Mr. Sakamoto, for the New Non-Union Contract!”: (Multi)National Threats and the Decline of the American Auto Industry in Ron Howard’s Gung Ho
3 Good Times, Bad Times . . . You Know I Had My Share(s): The Corporation in Five Popular Films
4 A Capital Death: Medicine, Technology, and the Care of the Self in Don DeLillo’s White Noise
5 Family Incorporated: William Gaddis’s J R and the Embodiment of Capitalism
6 Your Loss Is Their Gain: The Corporate Body and the Corporeal Body in Richard Powers’s Gain
Conclusion: Corporate Hegemony, Cubed
Notes
Works Cited
Index