Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance
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James Dorson
James Dorson is Assistant Professor of Literature at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He has been a visiting professor at Brown University and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His research interests include the politics of form, economic literary criticism, narrative theory, the history of science, and the Environmental Humanities. Among his publications areCounternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns (Campus 2016), the coedited volumesFictions of Management: Efficiency and Control in American Literature and Culture (Winter 2019) andAnecdotal Modernity: Making and Unmaking History (De Gruyter 2020), and the special issuesData Fiction: Naturalism, Narratives, and Numbers (Studies in American Naturalism 2017) andCormac McCarthy Between Worlds (European Journal of American Studies 2017). He is currently writing a book about competing visions of organization in American literary naturalism.
Abstract
Taking my departure in Chicago writers Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster’s business romances around the turn of the twentieth century, this essay examines how their novels comprise an overlooked archive of reflexive project thinking that sheds light on the cultural appeal of the project form, which over the last four decades has become a predominant way of organizing life and work in deindustrializing societies. Tracing the literary origins of the project form back to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, I show how the project form seeks to reconcile the two aesthetic and historical registers of capitalism – the romantic excitement of the capitalist adventurer and the bourgeois rationality of the work ethic – that Franco Moretti deems to be irreconcilable. While projects are by definition singular, they are also serial, as one project leads to the next. By examining the cultural logic of projects in Merwin and Webster’s novels, I show how the appeal of projects is closely tied to the narrativization of time, on the one hand, and the emplotment of projects through the adventure genre, on the other. But while the cultural function of projects underwrites their cultural authority and expansion across different domains of activity, the very seriality of the project form attenuates its cultural appeal by routinizing it. I argue that the business romance embodies this tension between singularity and seriality avant la lettrethrough its formulaic nature and the standardized singularity of its heroes designed for mass market consumption. As such, the essay charts a convergence of literary and organizational history that illuminates the cultural appeal of projects and the tension between singularity and seriality integral to the form.
Abstract
Taking my departure in Chicago writers Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster’s business romances around the turn of the twentieth century, this essay examines how their novels comprise an overlooked archive of reflexive project thinking that sheds light on the cultural appeal of the project form, which over the last four decades has become a predominant way of organizing life and work in deindustrializing societies. Tracing the literary origins of the project form back to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, I show how the project form seeks to reconcile the two aesthetic and historical registers of capitalism – the romantic excitement of the capitalist adventurer and the bourgeois rationality of the work ethic – that Franco Moretti deems to be irreconcilable. While projects are by definition singular, they are also serial, as one project leads to the next. By examining the cultural logic of projects in Merwin and Webster’s novels, I show how the appeal of projects is closely tied to the narrativization of time, on the one hand, and the emplotment of projects through the adventure genre, on the other. But while the cultural function of projects underwrites their cultural authority and expansion across different domains of activity, the very seriality of the project form attenuates its cultural appeal by routinizing it. I argue that the business romance embodies this tension between singularity and seriality avant la lettrethrough its formulaic nature and the standardized singularity of its heroes designed for mass market consumption. As such, the essay charts a convergence of literary and organizational history that illuminates the cultural appeal of projects and the tension between singularity and seriality integral to the form.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
