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Desire and Disillusionment: A Guide to American Fiction Since 1890 (Modern American Literature), by Lawrence E. Hussman
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Desire and Disillusionment: A Guide to American Fiction Since 1890 departs from the typical academic study in that it appeals to the general reading public, undergraduate and graduate students, and literary scholars. The book’s focus on a highly relatable subject, longing and loss, its running plot summaries, and lucid presentation account for this broad appeal. Lawrence E. Hussman examines selected novels and short stories of fifty major American fiction writers from Stephen Crane to Junot Diaz. The reader will also find references to American politics, history, and popular culture in the book. Additionally, the author’s decidedly original, provocative critical approach delivers new insights that will reshape thinking about American literature as a reflection of the nation’s way of life. Literary critics will find the discussion of naturalism as a bridge to modernism and postmodernism especially enlightening. Furthermore, the book includes a summary of ideas about desire from the ancient philosophers to today’s scientists who study the brain. Desire and Disillusionment can serve as a stimulating textbook in American literature, history, or philosophy classes.
- Sales Rank: #4732600 in Books
- Published on: 2013-08-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.80" h x 1.00" w x 5.90" l, 1.45 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 376 pages
About the Author
Lawrence E. Hussman is Professor Emeritus of English at Wright State University. He is the author of numerous scholarly essays and influential, highly acclaimed books focusing on the fiction of Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. Moreover, he has written two works of popular nonfiction, Counterterrorist and Danger’s Disciple. He holds a doctorate in English from the University of Michigan and, in addition to his academic career in the United States, he has taught American literature in Europe as a Fulbright scholar and as a visiting professor.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Superbly Written, Intriguing, and Useful
By Isabel Seligo Sperry
I love Lawrence E. Hussman's Desire and Disillusionment: A Guide to American Fiction Since 1890. I appreciate most of all the superb writing, which is direct and communicates clearly and precisely without any hint of pretentious obfuscation. Though I haven't read the whole book, I have enjoyed reading individual chapters, which each focus on one particular American author, beginning with Stephen Crane and ending with Junot Diaz. It's perfect as a reference work, as the choice of authors is excellent (covering 50 American authors and almost 125 years) and has never once disappointed me. I always find the author I want even when I am surprised he or she is included. The chapters are short (mostly 6 or 7 pages long), direct and filled with interesting information about each author's life and works as well as intriguing analysis of the way the author handles the theme of desire and disillusionment, a useful lens through which to examine life and literature. I have used it to look up a particular author as I am preparing to teach a work to gain a sense of where it fits in with that author's work as a whole and I have learned something new each time. For example, the chapter on Kate Chopin quotes her from the diary she kept between the ages of 16 and 20. As a college English instructor, I find it invaluable, but I also look forward to reading the work in its entirety since the analysis of these authors from the theme of desire and disillusionment is intriguing. My fantasy: teach this book with Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. But first I have to finish reading the book and read both in tandem to decide how practical this would be. Once I have finished, I will certainly write another review.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) “as one of the premier novels of ...
By David A. Horowitz
More Than an Accessible Window into Modern American Fiction
On the surface, as its subtitle indicates, Desire and Disillusionment offers an overview of creative fiction in the United States over the past 125 years. Yet in doing so, Lawrence Hussman provides a window into one of the central tensions of the American Dream -- the collision between human longing & limitations, a schism represented by expectations of potential opportunity and equally fervent aspirations for peace of mind.
Hussman begins with consideration of the naturalists – early twentieth century literary giants such as Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser who doubted one could effectively explain life through a religious lens and saw existence as the mere interplay of indifferent natural forces. These writers were part of a world in which modern science and skepticism blunted moral signposts, meaning, spiritual yearning, and desire, he explains.
Norris’s McTeague (1899), for example, provides the story of a coarse protagonist with an unquenchable longing for the unattainable. As a naturalist work, Hussman instructs, the novel demonstrates that “human desire comes to nothing, that men and women in the cosmic scheme equate in significance to gnats.” Similarly, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), described as “arguably the most influential American novel of the twentieth century,” contrasts the bright glare of light as the reflection off objects of longing while gloom and darkness represent the letdown that follows the acquisition of these objects.
Naturalist themes resurface in the fiction of Edith Wharton, to whom Hussman attributes the wisdom that “having all … only stirs the need for more than all,” and Willa Cather, who contrasts yearning with the unresponsiveness of nature. Although naturalism’s artistic ideals fall out of favor after World War I with the advent of modernist symbolism and subjectivity, Hussman points out, the genre’s questioning of the ultimate purpose of existence and its emphasis on desire and disillusionment remain.
“The vast majority of American fiction writers to this day have been consumed with the poetry and pathos of human desire and its evidently doomed direction,” he adds.
The 1920s Jazz Age produces Sinclair Lewis, who Hussman credits with generating “the most devastating critique of the American Dream ever constructed in fiction” through several works exposing the gap between materialism’s promise of fulfillment and its ultimate emptiness. Yet Hussman ranks F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) “as one of the premier novels of desire and disillusionment in the American canon.” He describes the novel’s characters as illustrating the insight that “all that glitters eventually glimmers” – a representation of “the disenchantment that nearly always streams in the wake of their dreams.”
The advent of Great Depression literature in the 1930s leads Hussman to focus on John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck, two novelists whose sensitivity to the poetic poignancy of the ordinary American capacity for dreaming dreams that deny limits brought widespread acclaim. In similar fashion, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), a reworking of several themes from Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), describes its hard-pressed African American protagonist Bigger Thomas’s “eternal reaching for something that was not there”
James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) explores the mix of lament and longing among African Americans whose basic desires have been blocked by two centuries of racism. In Hussman’s words, the short story speaks to “the daunting span between the ache and the answer, and the need to communicate … the suffering that such an expansive distance engenders.”
Hussman detects a similar search for communication and transcendence in the characters of many of the most illustrious works of post-World War II fiction. John Updike, for example, portrays adultery as the antidepressant that promises an elusive transcendence to middle-class suburbanites seeking protection from “the darkness without & the darkness within.” In The Ballad of the Sad Caf�, Carson McCullers describes love as a greedy emotion indulged in for the sake of the lover, not the loved one, a theme repeated in Lee Smith’s Fair & Tender Ladies (1988). Meanwhile, Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire (1977) explores the inability men have in convincing themselves that female partners can assuage their longing for sexual & spiritual fulfillment.
Broader rendering of the desire and disillusionment theme appears in the work of western novelist Wallace Stegner. In Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), a son describes his father as a man “who never knew himself, who was never satisfied, who was born disliking the present and believing in the future.” Duena Alfonsa, a world wise Mexican character in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992), delivers the comment that “The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.”
The American context of illusion garners attention in Indian-American Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989). Here, the female protagonist notes that “In America, nothing lasts … monuments are plastic, agreements are annulled” and “nothing is so terrible, or so wonderful, that it won’t disintegrate.” In Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), even cyberspace fosters disappointment. DeLillo’s novel concludes with a young nun searching for God on the Internet, only to find a world of limitless connections merely linking metal boxes of faux reality based on a “sequence of pulses.”
Hussman’s conclusion notes that some of the best contemporary writing comes from recent immigrants, whose fresh take on the American Dream comes amid the country’s waning influence and self-regard. “The staying power of the early American naturalists’ portrayal of life in this country as a tragedy of doomed desire should never be doubted,” Hussman insists. Cognizant of Sherwood Anderson’s lesson in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) that humans conceal and smother instincts and desire at their peril, the author of Desire and Disillusionment cannot escape the conclusion that “no cure for acute, undifferentiated desire has appeared on the horizon.”
The redeeming feature of Hussman’s opus, however, lies in the glimmers of hope that this admirer of literary naturalism offers readers. Segments on writers Lee Smith, Jane Smiley, and Dominican-American Junot Diaz suggest that contentment is plausible when expectations and dreams remain modest. Hussman also cites both Dreiser and Jay McInerney, who raise the possibility that giving, rather than getting, and the salvation of human connection can provide a cure for emotional restlessness and despondency.
Beyond these hints of optimism, the Afterword to Desire and Disillusionment includes the complete text of Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Sunday Morning,” published in segments between 1915 and 1923, and Hussman’s three-page explication of its potential meaning.
The verse’s significance, Hussman proposes, lies in its celebration of the sacred quality of the tangible components of the world around us, including the renewing cycle of the seasons and weather and the vibrant changefulness of life. Stevens proceeds to note the relevance of pain to the appreciation of pleasure and the role of death in enhancing existence, Hussman argues. In other words, the poem offers the suggestion that “the spice of life owes to its limitations and its transience.” In Hussman’s treatment of Steven’s message, “the earth is an island in the cosmos, its inhabitants confined, yet unfettered.” Life with its struggles and compensations trumps an imaginary heaven where nothing changes and rivers never flow to the oceans. The only fulfillment, “the reachable realization” of redirected desire, concludes Hussman’s tribute to “Sunday Morning,” lies in the daily recognition of the grandeur of the universe and the privileged position of humans in it.
Written in accessible and witty prose designed for an audience beyond the classroom, Desire and Disillusionment offers pithy synopses of the short stories and novels of fifty modern American writers. Its foremost utility, however, lies in its exploration of central features of the American psyche, its portrait of the universal quest for transcendence and significance, and its enunciation of values and philosophies that can enhance life rather than contribute to an endless cycle of disappointment and despair.
It is not often that chroniclers of our literary tradition offer antidotes to the perils of modern and post-modern existence. Lawrence Hussman accomplishes the task with elegance, humor, and insight. Desire and Disillusionment is well worth the journey.
David A. Horowitz is the author of The People’s Voice: A Populist Cultural History of Modern America (2008) and Getting There: An American Cultural Odyssey (2015).
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Desire and Disillusionment Condensed
By M. Clifford
Lawrence Hussman's "Desire and Disillusionment: A Guide to American Fiction Since 1890," is an illuminating and insightful analysis of American literature spanning the 20th century. The authors and the pieces of literature discussed are the best of the best of the 100 years from 1890 to 1990. In spite of having read many of these authors' writings while in college and later, I found there were many authors and many novels and short stories I had not read or had read and forgotten. It was both a wonderful stroll down memory lane, and a revelation in the persistence of desire and disillusionment that permeates the American culture. This is a collection that is perfect for those who enjoy good literature, from the English or literature teacher to the casual reader. Hussman summarizes a sample of 50 authors' writings, and intermingles through the plot summaries the insight and interpretation of the pieces from a naturalistic perspective. If you are interested in a succinct view of 20th century American literary icons, this is the book to buy. It's one that can be enjoyed for its own sake, but is also a fine American literature reference.
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