Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature

Contrary to previous studies of Tillie Olsen’s writing, Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature analyzes the impact of one of the most important philosophies of the last century, dialectical materialism, on the form and content of Olsen’s fiction. By revealing the unconceptualized dialectics of Olsen’s work and its appreciation by scholars and casual readers, this study achieves a dialectical synthesis that incorporates and extends the insights of and about Olsen in terms of dialectical materialism. By foregrounding Olsen’s dialectical approach, it explains and largely resolves apparent contradictions between her Marxism and feminism; her depictions of class, race, and gender; the literature of her earlier and later periods; and her use of realist and modernist literary forms and techniques. Consequently, this project makes a case for the importance of Olsen’s Marxist education during the “Red Decade” of the 1930s and within the U.S. proletarian literary movement.

Dawahare (California State Univ., Northridge) examines the work of proletarian writer Tillie Olsen (1912–2007) through the lens of dialectical materialism. He argues persuasively that although Olsen did not participate directly in the proletarian literary debates of the 1930s, as the daughter of socialists from pre-Soviet Russia she had been introduced to “Marxist theoretical orientations,” as he writes in chapter 2, and closely followed those debates in “the major Marxist literary and cultural periodicals.” In the introduction Dawahare explains the “enormous and complicated topic” of dialectical materialism as a historical method of analyzing how and why social change occurs, questions that he sees as central to Olsen’s fiction. He devotes chapter 3 to Tell Me A Riddle (1961), analyzing the stories in that work as “both dialectical materialist metaphors and dialectical representations of working-class life in mid-century America.” The title story, he asserts, focuses on “the struggle between opposing forces of dialectical contradictions that cannot find resolution within the constraints of capitalism.” Dawahare deftly draws on existing scholarship on Olsen, Marxism, and proletarian literature, along with archival sources and an interview he conducted with Olsen in 1992 to underscore Olsen’s engagement with Marxist ideas in her works.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty., Anthony Dawahare brilliantly demonstrates the centrality of dialectical materialism not only to the methodology guiding Tillie Olsen’s writing but also to the proletarian literary movement as a whole. While full of incisive and original readings of Olsen’s oeuvre, this is far more than a single-author study; Dawahare’s firm grasp of fundamental principles of Marxist literary criticism supplies a model for analysis of a wide range of revolutionary texts aiming to portray what Olsen called the ‘not-yet in the now.’, Anthony Dawahare’s book punctures a myth that only real men do Marxism. His subtle and intelligent appreciation of Tillie Olsen’s dialectical materialism is a significant advance in Olsen studies, and provides an exciting new key by which to read her work. The book is especially valuable for scholars assessing Olsen’s relationship to proletarian literature as a whole, and proletarian aesthetics in particular. A stirring, original work of scholarship., Dawahare’s book is guaranteed to make waves in proletarian literary studies not just because it takes a heterodox position on the continuing relevance of dialectical materialism and the wide purchase of Marxist social critique, but also because it manages to make a serious and substantial case for a new, more critical Marxist reading of Tillie Olsen’s fiction., Tillie Olsen’s deep engagement with Marxism on a formal as well as thematic level has often been obscured by Olsen’s much-repeated criticism of the “head boys” of the US literary Left of the 1930s and 1940s. In this study, Anthony Dawahare shows the ways that Olsen was profoundly influenced by dialectical materialism, which is to say Marxist philosophy. He convincingly argues that this influence was not simply on the level of sentiment but was also structural. In this regard, Dawahare shows that Olsen was not isolated or singular, but part of a larger Marxist literary tradition. In short, Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature, illuminates both the work of Olsen and the Marxist current of US literature in new ways.

Anthony Dawahare is professor of English at California State University, Northridge.