Inheritors of progress: Glaspell, the university, and liberal culture in the United States
Item
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Title
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Inheritors of progress: Glaspell, the university, and liberal culture in the United States
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:d7498cfd0d0c:10812
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identifier
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11098
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Creator
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Winetsky, Michael,
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Contributor
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Edmund L. Epstein
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American studies | American literature | Theater | American Culture | Dewey | John | Glaspell | Susan | Liberalism | Progressive Era | University
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Abstract
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This dissertation illuminates the ethics of a liberal culture in the United States as reflected in the plays and fiction of Susan Glaspell (1876 - 1948). Liberal culture flourishes in colleges and universities, and it also has a social geography associated with places such as New York and Massachusetts as well as Chicago and Iowa.;Through a close reading of Glaspell's 1921 drama Inheritors, this dissertation builds a deeper understanding of the ethics of liberal culture -- ways of thinking and behaving that encourage sexual freedom, that value ethnic diversity, that practice peace, that resist the degradations of free market capitalism, and that confront the legacies of European colonialism. My analysis of Glaspell's work demonstrates the resonance of these values with classical liberal political philosophy.;This study also explores ideas that emerged with these ethics, but did not gain the cultural traction of other liberal values: a biological and religious concept of progress. Glaspell's voice sounds in a chorus of reformist voices from the Progressive Era: John Dewey, Margaret Sanger, Alice Paul, Upton Sinclair, Walter Lippman and Herbert Croly. Glaspell, to a greater degree than her contemporaries, associated progress with a kind natural religion. My study of Glaspell's work finds new ways to trace the instabilities that made this concept of progress untenable at the time, and unearths some aspects of this progress that might still be viable.;My purpose is to bring into relief the situation of liberal culture -- that it has a coherent set of ethics around which groups of people already congregate, but that such groups remain, in a sense, dispirited.;In the conclusion of this dissertation, I turn to the Glaspell's work as it reflects on the idea of a university. The purpose of this conclusion is to trouble our contemporary notion of disciplinarity. Glaspell wrote about the university as the moral compass of society, but her plays and fiction were unpalatable to the twentieth-century critics who established the disciplinary boundaries of literary study. Ironically, the ethics of which Glaspell wrote are inscribed everywhere in the humanities, underlying much of our contemporary scholarship.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
