Type of Document	Dissertation
Author	Dupuy, Jason
Author's Email Address	jdupuy7@tigers.lsu.edu
URN	etd-06302010-155903
Title	Paths of Most Resistance: Navigating the Culture Industry in William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Welty
Degree	Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department	English
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Moreland, Richard Committee Chair Costello, Brannon Committee Member Freedman, Carl Committee Member Michie, Elsie Committee Member Weber, Christopher Dean's Representative
Keywords	modernism culture industry popular culture mass culture Schwartz Wright Welty Faulkner
Date of Defense	2010-06-08
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract This dissertation explores how four modernist writers of the 1930s and 1940s—William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Welty—used their works to present ways to resist and navigate what they present as the frequently reductive worldview offered by the culture industry. Faulkner tends to show the culture industry as selling easy answers that focus on the end result, which allows his characters to approach the culture industry with a sense of fatalism. To resist this, Faulkner stresses a step-by-step, complex dialectical understanding of the culture industry, one that shows the fissures in its seemingly straightforward narratives and allows the reader to see how the narratives of the culture industry are not totalizing and can be resisted. Richard Wright, with his Native Son (1940), has written a better piece of mass culture, one that both gives the reader what he wants and helps show how the pleasures of mass culture are tied to a racist system. More than any of the other writers I’m discussing, Wright courts a wide audience by expertly using the tropes of various popular forms of the late 1930s—movies, crime novels, gothic fiction, newspapers, protest novels—and then adds an extra layer of analysis that explores how these pieces of mass culture are not ideologically neutral. One of the protagonists in a Delmore Schwartz story compares a movie to the Oracle at Delphi, which gave prophesies enigmatic enough to allow differing interpretations. The masses in Schwartz’s stories approach mass culture looking for simple entertainment, and that’s what they get. The conflicted artist figures who are the protagonists of Schwartz’s stories approach mass culture more complexly, and Schwartz shows how an artistically inclined mind can find much of value in mass culture if he knows what to look for. Eudora Welty, finally, shows mass culture as something that can help compound a sense of (frequently female) alienation. For Welty, it is small moments of emotional connection that allow people to find a way out of the totalizing system of mass culture.
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