Journal of Literary Theory (JLT)

Sinding, Michael; Indepdent Scholar

The Turn to the Mind, Inside and Out [»Imagining Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Narrative, Embodied Simulation, Metaphor and Complex Tropes.« Vienna, May 21 to 24, 2008.]

Volpp, Lisa; Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

Mediales Erzählen III: Kommunikation und narrative Instanzen [Universität Wuppertal, 11. und 12. September 2010.]

Rabinowitz, Peter J.; Comparative Literature Department, Hamilton College

On Teaching The Story of O. Lateral Ethics and the Conditions of Reading [Full text]

Ort, Nina; Universität München

Der lange Denkweg des Umberto Eco [Grit Fröhlich, Umberto Eco. Philosophie – Ästhetik – Semiotik, 2009.]

Bühler, Axel; Philosophisches Institut, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

Die Überprüfung von Hypothesen über Autorabsichten [Abstract]

Christ, Birte; Universität Gießen

 1 
Birte Christ 
 
Towards a Theory of Poverty: 
Rethinking »Race, Gender, Class« in (American) Cultural Studies 
 
• Gavin Jones, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-
1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2008. XVI, 228 S. [Preis: EUR 36,99]. 
ISBN: 978-0-691-12753-8. 
 
 
1. Context: »Class« 
 
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the field of literary and cultural studies has 
turned to a re-examination of the category of »class«. Cora Kaplan’s January 2000 special is-
sue of Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) on Rereading 
Class and bell hooks’s stocktaking Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000) were only the first 
contributions to a debate that has accelerated considerably over the past three to four years. 
The German American Studies Association’s 2010 conference theme of »American Econo-
mies«, a conference on »Transformations: Theorizing Race & Class in the 21st Century« held 
at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in June of this year, and a forthcoming special 
issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies entitled Beyond the Culturalization of Class testify 
to the currency of »class« in the German academic context, too. The interest in the category of 
»class« gathered full momentum – on this as well as on the other side of the Atlantic – in the 
wake of two signal events: first, the publication of Walter Benn Michaels’s polemic attack on 
the academic left’s embrace of identity politics in The Trouble With Diversity in 2006, and 
second, the global economic crisis beginning to unfold in the fall of 2008. In his study Ameri-
can Hungers, Gavin Jones answers – timely, nuancedly, and in pathbreaking ways – to the 
challenges that both Michaels’s theoretical argument and economic reality pose to literary 
scholars committed to a progressive political agenda. 
 
Michaels’s polemic targets the way in which cultural studies has conceptualized class as a 
cultural category, or as a question of identity. He argues that by viewing class as equivalent to 
race, and thus as a social construction, and by asserting that class membership is determined 
by which social class a person identifies with, left academics »accomplish[…] the magical 
trick of redistributing wealth without actually transferring any money« (197) and thus suc-
cessfully protect their upper middle-class economic privileges. To correct this analytic myo-
pia, and to right its social consequences, Michaels calls on cultural studies scholars – as well 
as on politicians and society at large – to focus on material inequality in American life and to 
stop focusing on cultural diversity and questions of identity. Michaels’s unabashed icono-
clasm and his obvious relish in the intellectual brilliance of his own argument has led many 
scholars to dismiss his intervention as »a profusion of cynicism incompatible with any serious 
political agenda«, as Alan Wolfe wrote, and to refuse engaging with Michaels’s argument al-
together. Gavin Jones, instead, is in dialogue with Michaels – footnoting Michaels’s more 
academic forerunner to his popular polemic, The Shape of the Signifier (2004) – when he ob-
serves that »An overwhelming interest in oppressed subject positions has tended to evade the 
problem of economic inequality by centering social marginalization on the cultural identity of 
the marginalized« (7). Yet, where Michaels is sweeping, Jones is meticulous; where Michaels 
projects monolithic positions in academia and politics, Jones differentiates; and where 
Michaels’s possibly earnest call for rethinking left politics becomes submerged in self-serving 
diabolical wit, Jones calmly rethinks. American Hungers constitutes a complex response to 
 2 
the questions that Michaels never answers: How do we as literary and cultural critics proceed 
if we do take seriously the insight that class is not equivalent to culturally and socially con-
structed identities? How does this insight change the way we theorize the category of class? 
 
Jones refocuses our thinking about class in a simple but very effective way: he makes poverty 
– and not class – his »organizing frame of inquiry« (149). In doing so, he pinpoints that which 
is the problem of the classed society and disallows its circumvention: the problem is not that 
there are different classes, but that the classed society produces deprivation and suffering. By 
recognizing poverty as more central than class, Jones simultaneously addresses the most ur-
gent problem societies are facing during the ongoing economic crisis and offers ways of un-
derstanding it through discourse. 
 
 
2. Theory: »Poverty« 
 
Jones defines poverty as »socioeconomic suffering«. Socioeconomic suffering, he states, 
»gets at the peculiar dialectics of poverty as a category – its position between material and 
nonmaterial, objective and subjective criteria« (3). However, he is not content with simply 
and vaguely posing, as cultural studies parlance would readily allow him to do, that poverty is 
located »at the intersection« of the material and non-material. Jones instead truly treats pov-
erty in its material and non-material aspects as »dialectical« – not only in his theoretical intro-
ductory chapter, but also consistently so in his ensuing close readings. The way in which he 
elucidates the relationship between the planes of the material and non-material, between the 
objective and measurable and the subjective and non-measurable is what is most innovative in 
his theorizing. To do justice to this dialectics – and hence to the complexity of poverty – is 
what will prove to be most challenging for scholars who apply Jones’s category of poverty in 
their analyses of texts. 
 
Viewing poverty as socioeconomic suffering, Jones argues, makes poverty a »primarily mate-
rial and economic« state of lack that is structured by social power, and that »is physical at its 
extreme, returning ultimately to the body as the site that bears the marks, the damage, of being 
poor«. As such, poverty becomes measurable and objective; it becomes a state of being cir-
cumscribed by the lack of nourishment and shelter, and by common numerical thresholds 
such as relative and absolute poverty lines. Yet, if poverty is thus marked on the body, it is 
»always as much subjective as it is objective«. It is in the material, physical body of the poor 
individual where the »materiality of need […] opens into the nonmaterial areas of psychol-
ogy, emotion, and culture« (3). Jones’s analyses always start out with looking at material and 
physical foundations of suffering and then turn to the social and cultural contexts as well as 
the emotions that always shape the specific experience of suffering. He focuses on disentan-
gling the material and nonmaterial, and at the same time pays attention to the ways in which 
the material and nonmaterial collapse, or do not collapse, to the ways, that is, in which the 
material and nonmaterial sharpen or alleviate the individual’s experience of suffering. 
 
Jones’s firm grounding of the category of poverty in the dialectics of the material and non-
material, of the economic and the cultural, bring the following return: first, it allows for 
analyses of »classed« states of being that neither simply ignore culture and identity (as Walter 
Benn Michaels in his iconoclasm would have it) nor displace the economic dimensions of 
these »classed« states of being by psychocultural ones (as happens frequently with regard to 
race and gender, as Jones convincingly demonstrates in his detailed overview of recent schol-
arship on class). Second, Jones’s dialectics of poverty frames poverty as a category that cuts 
across class while exploring the different ways and degrees in which material deprivation and 
 3 
cultural and individual factors bring about suffering for differently »classed« individuals. It is 
thus a category that can envision individuals of all classes to move in and out of states of so-
cioeconomic suffering and thus de-essentializes class. It provides us with a model which, be-
cause of its dialectical nature, can encompass kinds of suffering that are determined by mate-
rial and non-material factors to differing degrees, and that yet never loses sight of poverty’s 
economic foundations. Jones is certainly not alone in this attempt to move Marxist scholar-
ship beyond the base-superstructure model and make it productive in the twenty-first century, 
as, for example, Eric Schocket’s insistence on »class as process« in his 2006 monograph Van-
ishing Moments may serve to illustrate. However, Jones’s dialectic category of poverty is an 
abstraction from a close analysis of texts, and not a category that embodies the scholar’s pre-
textual desire for the reality of social mobility and that serves to detect such mobility in texts 
that grapple with poverty. 
 
 
3. Readings: »Hungers« 
 
Jones explores texts that confront »head-on the tensions involved in producing discursive 
richness from analyses of poorness, particularly within an American cultural and political 
context«(19) in three distinct historical periods. In Part One, he studies Henry David Tho-
reau’s and Rebecca Harding Davis’s vis-à-vis Henry Melville’s explorations of poverty. Tho-
reau and Davis serve as examples of how conceptions of poverty as »pauperism« confuse 
causes and effects of poverty, and how even differentiated accounts of poverty are always in 
danger of tipping over into blaming the individual and representing them as complicit with his 
or her condition. Melville, on the other hand, is shown to confront and grapple with exactly 
this culturalization of poverty that his contemporaries can be said to engage in, especially in 
Redburn, Israel Potter, Pierre, and sketches of the mid-1850s. Melville, according to Jones, 
first recognizes how the socioeconomic and the cultural are linked in poverty, and how this 
link makes the representation of poverty difficult. In Part Two, Jones considers Dreiser’s 
treatment of the paradox involved in white male Americans’ belief in upward mobility and the 
persistence of poverty even among this supposedly advantaged group; Edith Wharton’s The 
House of Mirth serves as a counterpart to Sister Carrie and is analyzed with regard to the way 
in which poverty affects women in specifically gendered economic and psychological ways. 
The genres of the documentary (Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) and the autobiogra-
phy (Wright’s Black Boy) during the Depression are the focus of the third and last part of the 
book. While Jones looks primarily at the dialectics of poverty and gender in his second part, 
he looks at the dialectics of poverty and race in his last part. 
 
One point of criticism of Jones’ study might be that he could have used the title of his book 
more productively, and link the poor, hungering body and hence the material conditions of 
suffering even more closely and more explicitly to its cultural and psychological causes. Until 
page 109, where the reader learns that the original title of Wright’s autobiography was Ameri-
can Hunger instead of Black Boy, the motivation for and origins of Jones’s title remain un-
clear, and even when Jones discusses the theme, or even category, of »hunger« in Black Boy, 
he does not link it explicitly to his own title. Jones here does not only give away a nice 
»hook« that would immediately link his dialectic model of poverty to a literary representation 
and exploration of this dialectic and to the national specificity of representations of poverty 
that this model applies to. Rather, it appears that the term »poverty« in his study functions the 
same way that »hunger« does in Wright’s autobiography, and »hunger« – I believe – would, 
even for Jones, be the more appropriate term by which to catch the merging of the visceral 
and the intellectual, the bodily and the psychological, the measurable and the non-measurable. 
While a reconfiguration of the category of »class« through the category of »hunger« instead 
 4 
of »poverty« might be strategically unsound because »hunger« might seem even further re-
moved within the context of theories of class, a discussion of the concept of »hunger(s)« in 
the introductory chapter would have been welcome. 
 
 
4. Conclusion: »Literature« 
 
American Hungers focuses on U.S. literature from the 1840s to 1945 and takes account of his-
torical developments in the form and content of poverty discourse. What makes Jones’s study 
extraordinary is not only its power of balance and differentiation with regard to poverty as a 
social and historical phenomenon, but also its insistence that poverty in discourse must be 
recognized in its aesthetic dimensions as well. Jones never forgets that – while the texts he 
analyzes engage both with the social reality of poverty and with their own difficulties in rep-
resenting poverty – he is looking at literature or, at representations. Literary scholars who are 
committed to a progressive politics often seem caught between a political Scylla and an ana-
lytical Charybdis in their pursuit to bring economic inequality back onto a national/academic 
agenda: to act politically, or at least to affect direct social change, they must leave their me-
tier, as Walter Benn Michaels does when he turns to an analysis of university politics or Evo 
Morales’ inauguration ceremony and reinvents himself as a public intellectual – a political 
Scylla that is not for everyone to happily choose. Jones shows, instead, what literary critics in 
their own field can do with Michaels’s polemic – and where the limits of the politicalness of 
literary studies are. The analytical Charybdis that politically committed scholars are in danger 
of being devoured by is that of confusing the levels of representation and the real world, of 
mistaking literature for life. Jones always steers clear of that danger and constantly reflects 
that he is dealing with representations – and ends up being the more political for it. 
 
Jones literary »theory of poverty« must be considered one of the most groundbreaking and at 
the same time nuanced interventions into theories of class. His theory of poverty as a state of 
being dialectically shaped by economic, structural and non-material, individual conditions 
challenges us to recognize representations of poverty in their entire complexity. Implicitly 
only, he also challenges us to interrogate the complexities of poverty in the real world – and 
possibly act upon our insights. 
 
Birte Christ 
Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen 
Institut für Anglistik  
 
 
2010-07-07 
JLTonline ISSN 1862-8990 
 
Copyright © by the author. All rights reserved. 
This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author 
and JLTonline. 
For other permission, please contact JLTonline. 
 
 5 
 
 
 
How to cite this item: 
 
Birte Christ, Towards a Theory of Poverty: Rethinking »Race, Gender, Class« in (American) Cultural Stud-
ies. (Review of: Gavin Jones, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945. 
Princeton: Princeton University Press 2008.) 
In: JLTonline (07.07.2010) 
Persistent Identifier: urn:nbn:de:0222-001116 
Link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0222-001116 


English

Towards a Theory of Poverty: Rethinking »Race, Gender, Class« in (American) Cultural Studies. [Gavin Jones, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945, 2008.]

Kaiser, Gerhard; Seminar für Deutsche Philologie, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Der »Weg um die Kugel«. Clemens Lugowskis semantischer Umbau vom »mythischen Analogon« zur »deutschen Wirklichkeit« [Abstract]

Mellmann, Katja; Seminar für Deutsche Philologie, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Die metrische Gestalt. Mit Überlegungen zur Sinnfälligkeit des Viertakters [Abstract]

Skilleås, Ole Martin; Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen

Philosophy and Literature [Abstract]

Metzger, Steffanie; Institut für deutsche Philologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Das Ich als Geschichte: Erzählte ›Lebensgestalten‹ [Abstract]

Not a member yet