Description
- Abstract:
- Professional Sentiments argues that nineteenth-century U.S. fiction revised sentimental models of subjectivity and social relations to evolve an affectivity of professionalism. Challenging a critical practice that views professionalism as a hegemonic ideology of impersonal social control subjugating the private, the affective and the contingent to (white, male) forces of bureaucratic "rationality," works of nineteenth-century U.S. fiction promoted professionalism as a structure of feeling that, like sentimentalism, might insulate communities and vocations from the corrosive forces of an impersonal marketplace, while simultaneously promoting greater social and economic mobility across lines of race, class, gender and region--just the kind of mobility that sentimental conceptions of the social militated against. These texts characterize professionalism as concerned less with what you know than with how you feel about what you know. Thus they bridge the semantic gap between profession as a kind of work and profession as a public avowal of a particular feeling or sentiment. Professionalism, in these texts, grounds social relations not in interpersonal sympathy but in one's affective investment in--what Sarah Orne Jewett describes as "sympathy with"--one's work. Chapter One looks at Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and writings on the servant problem to explore sentimentalism's failure to imagine harmonious social relations consistent with class mobility, a failure that paves the way for the rise of professionalism. Chapter Two sees early U.S. detective fiction as reworking the conventions of sentimental and domestic fiction to construct narratives of professional feeling. Chapter Three explores how two regionalist texts by women authors unexpectedly greet the professionalization of medicine as an affective medium through which conflicts between local and national conceptions of authority, meaning and value might be negotiated in terms favorable to women's agency. The final chapter reads Charles Chesnutt's exploration of race, uplift and professional feeling in The Marrow of Tradition (1901) against the backdrop of a cultural moment in which many U.S. black medical schools faced extinction in the name of professional "reform."
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2010)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Sweeney, Brian D.,
"Professional Sentiments: Professionalism, Affect, and American Literature, 1830-1910"
(2010).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0SJ1HT2
