Description
- Abstract:
- "Ugly Americanism" examines the intersection of aesthetic theory and early-twentieth-century literature, tracking how American authors and artists engaged the idea of ugliness in their work. It argues that the ugly provided a crucial, self-critical aesthetic framework for their respective visions of “The American Scene,” taking as its starting point Henry James’s famous description of the nation as an object of aesthetic contemplation. When James visited America in 1904, he described a vision of American Beauty that was so alluring it made for “the golden frame of an interesting picture.” Yet, decades later, what James described as “excrescences on the American surface” came to spoil the national picture. In 1927, the cultural critic H. L. Mencken wrote “The Libido for the Ugly,” providing a powerful counternarrative of American Ugliness. Refuting Mencken’s claims that Americans are anti-aesthetic or even anaesthetic, "Ugly Americanism" considers the artistic possibilities of ugliness understood not simply as a failure to be beautiful but as a generative aesthetic logic that actively rejects beauty as its ideal. Following creative thinkers that took the nation as their theme, chapters of this study explore the interrelated aesthetic, embodied, and social dimensions of American Ugliness. Chapter 1 compares the emphatically ugly literary style of Gertrude Stein’s "The Making of Americans" (1925) with the modernist cult of ugliness announced by Ezra Pound in 1913. Chapter 2 examines the cultural politics of subversive racial caricatures in Carl Van Vechten’s "Nigger Heaven" (1926) and Rudolph Fisher’s "The Conjure-Man Dies" (1932), putting them in dialogue with W. E. B. DuBois’s influential mandate that all black art be beautiful. Chapter 3 explores the grotesque camp sensibility of Nathanael West’s "The Day of the Locust" (1939) alongside the photography of William Mortensen, suggesting that Hollywood’s camera eye stoked violence by imposing false coherence onto a world of unfulfillable desire. The study concludes with a coda considering the politics of ugliness alongside William Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s 1958 bestselling political novel "The Ugly American." As argued, such creative projects are characteristic of Ugly Americanism: stylizing modes of thought that not only aim to “get ugly” with audiences but that interrogate their investments in a shared, idealized national life.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- All rights reserved. Collection is open to the Brown community for research.
Citation
Wasserman, Dashiell,
"Ugly Americanism: American Literature, Culture, and Aesthetic Judgment"
(2020).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/dk77-jb33
