Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
For many twenty-first century readers, the term “proletarian literature” conjures up the 1930s, when magazines like the New Masses and the various organs of the John Reed Clubs supported the creation of a working-class literature that would underpin the leftist project of preparing the proletariat for its world-historical task of abolishing capitalism and creating an egalitarian society. Even if revolution was not on the horizon, the task of the proletarian writer was, as Tillie Olsen poignantly put it, to depict “the not- yet in the now.” In the wake of the failure—or, let us say, the long-term deferral—of that project, proletarian literature might be supposed to have fallen by the historical wayside. Yet the impulse to create literary works embodying a class-conscious critique of the existing world and positing, by implication or declaration, that a better world is both possible and necessary has not died out—even if it has been relegated to the sidelines of literary production. I direct attention here to a small cluster of texts that—while hardly constituting the only significant leftist writing of our time—ably articulate this abiding impulse.
Repository Citation
Foley, Barbara. "Proletarian Literature Today: On Struggle Magazine [Review]." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 3, 2010, pp. 1–6. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss3/13