Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le SueurBetter Red is an interdisciplinary study addressing the complicated intersection of American feminism and the political left as refracted in Tillie Olsen's and Meridel Le Sueur's lives and literary texts. The first book-length study to explore these feminist writers' ties to the American Communist Party, it contributes to a reenvisioning of 1930s U.S. Communism as well as to efforts to promote working-class writing as a legitimate category of literary analysis. At once loyal members of the male-dominated Communist party and emerging feminists, Olsen and Le Sueur exhibit in their writing tendencies both toward and away from Party tenets and attitudes--at points subverting formalist as well as orthodox Marxist literary categories. By producing working-class discourse, Olsen and Le Sueur challenge the bourgeois assumptions--often masked as classless and universal--of much canonical literature; and by creating working-class women's writing, they problematize the patriarchal nature of the Left and the masculinist assumptions of much proletarian literature, anticipating the concerns of "second wave" feminists a generation later. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
The Thirties Literary Left | 15 |
Scratch a Communist Women and the American Communist Party During the Depression | 39 |
Meridel Le Sueur Biographical Sketch and Reportage | 72 |
Le Sueurs The Girl Our Fathers Annunciation and Corn Village | 108 |
Biographical Sketch and Thirties Publications | 141 |
Olsens Yonnondio From the Thirties | 174 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
active American American Communist Party Anna Annunciation bourgeois Breadlines Chapter child cited Communism consciousness Corn Village criticism culture Daily Worker daughter discourse discussed dominant Dorothy Healey Emily essay Eva's experience father feel Feminist gender Girl Gold Gold's heteroglossia human husband issue Jack Olsen John Reed Club Josephine Herbst journal labor Left leftist letter literary lives Magil male Marxist Masses Mazie meaning Meridel Le Sueur monological mother movement myth narrator notes novel oppression organization Partisan Review Party members Party's political proletarian literature proletarian realism published question radical Rahv readers reading reportage resistance response revolution revolutionary Riddle role Rosenfelt interview San Francisco says Schleuning sexual silence social socialist Soviet Soviet Union Stand Here Ironing story strike structures struggle Sueur and Olsen Sunday Worker Tell texts Tillie Olsen Union voices Whitey woman women writers working-class writing wrote Yonnondio York