Proletarian Literature in the 1930s from the view pint of class, race, and gender

2019 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16K02481
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Literature in English
• Research Institution: Iwate University
• Principal Investigator: Saito Hirotsugu 岩手大学, 人文社会科学部, 教授 (90180801)
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2020-03-31
• Keywords: プロレタリア文学 / ジェンダー / 人種 / 階級

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In America, after the onset of the Great Depression of 1929, the Communist movement developed dramatically. Newly published left-wing journals such as New Masses, The Liberator, and Partisan Review tried to inspire the lower-class workers to awaken to the class-based social structure by developing proletarian literature that could promote social revolution.
The rise of proletarian literature raised two issues. The first issue was about the political usability of literature. William Phillips and Philip Rahv, for instance, denied the priority of politics over literature, starting in the late 1930s to advocate modernist literature of Europe. Another issue raised by the proletarian literature movement was about the relationships of class, race, and gender. I analyzed a number of proletarian novels to examine their originality and clarify complicated relationships of class, race, and gender described in them.

Free Research Field

アメリカ文学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

プロレタリア小説を階級という観点からとらえるのではなく、人種やジェンダー、さらにはセクシュアリティといった観点から捉え直すことにより、プロレタリア小説が共産主義運動を推進する単なる「道具」でもないし、階級意識を反映した小説でもないこと、そして独自の様式と複雑なテーマが織り込まれていることを明らかにした。また、プロレタリア小説を論じる場合は、旧来のリアリズム小説の規範からアプロ―チするのではなく、異なる美学に依拠する必要があることを提案した。