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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Ladd, Michelle R.. "Sometimes a Cigar. . . : Literature and the American Experience of Modernity," Cultural Studies, Claremont Graduate University, December 2006. Advisor: Cristanne Miller
This dissertation uses the symbolic structure of the cigar in American literature between 1880 and 1930 to illuminate the paradoxes and anxieties of modernization in the United States. Because the cigar embodies the very ambivalence of modernity—symbolizing as it does modern genteel authority even as it quite literally bears the stamp of its exotic places of origin and the Otherness involved in its production—it provides an excellent lens for viewing concerns about social changes and their effects on perceptions of individuality, equality, democracy, labor, experience and pleasure. In late-nineteenth century American culture, the cigar symbolized not only the imagined natural Other, but also the processes of objectification required for modern subject formation. Novels of this period develop characters who strive to forge and maintain their own identities, and to have those identities recognized by others throught the objects they deploy in higly specific material contexts. To varying degrees, each novel points to specifically modern contingent relationships, mediated or reflected by the cigar: independent individual and bourgeois social authority; healthy citizen and degenerate “alien”; powerful nation-state and far-flung empire; autonomous subject and commodified object.
These relationships point to the intersections of literary and cultural production, social history, and the manufacture and marketing of cigars. As objects meant to be enjoyed on nearly every sensory level, yet ultimately smoked out of existence, cigars perfectly emblematize the contradictions of modernity. Though cigars offer fleeting pleasure, the end of which is always waste, they always also mark the weighty pursuit of self-motivated autonomy fundamental to American identity. Cigars, then, are neither permanent nor completely evanescent. Their presence lingers in ephemera, in cultural lore, and in cigar butts that litter the novels that move American literature from realism to naturalism to modernism at the turn of the twentieth century.
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