________________________________________________________
Anthony Dawahare
Ph.D. University of California, Irvine 1994

Assistant Professor,
Department of English, California State University, Northridge: Twentieth-Century American Literature and Literary Theory and Criticism

Anthony Dawahare's interest in radical American literature originated in 1983, while he was an undergraduate student at Pasadena City College.  He had a professor who had written a Ph.D. dissertation in the mid-seventies on Mike Gold, the proletarian writer, critic, and editor of The New Masses.  This professor incorporated some articles by Gold in a course he taught on literary theory.  At the time, Dawahare was impressed with Gold's polemic on art, particularly since he had not come across any college literary texts distantly resembling his.  After Dawahare transferred to the University of California, Irvine (UCI) to complete his B.A., he did not hear another word about Gold, or any proletarian writers.  It was as if the "Red Decade" and its writers (aside, of course, from canonical writers such as Steinbeck and Hemingway) never existed.

In 1987 Dawahare decided to enter the Ph.D. program at UCI, because he was interested in continuing his literary studies in a program with an emphasis in critical theory. There he met another professor who was interested in thirties literature. Dawahare decided to do a two quarter long independent study with him on Philip Rahv, critic and editor for The Partisan Review.  Dawahare's essay on Rahv attempted to theorize his move away from the proletarian literary movement and the subsequent academic institutionalization during the height of the Cold War of once radical intellectuals like Rahv.

Dawahare's research on Rahv in the thirties laid the basis for much of his thinking in his Ph.D. dissertation.  He discovered that most studies of the 1930s literary left bracket the study of proletarian literature from sustained consideration of influences outside the Left political culture of the period.  Dawahare began to ask, for example, did the formation of popular culture in the thirties, with the nationalization of radio and the proliferation of "talkies," influence the politics and narrative strategies of proletarian literature?  How are the experiences and ideologies of global capitalism inscribed in proletarian literature, given and/or despite the centrality of anti-imperialistic politics in the literary movement?  And how might proletarian literature be a form of modernism?  Dawahare discovered that categories such as proletarian, bourgeois, realism, and modernism are more fluid than many literary histories have made them out to be.

For his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Proletarian Modernism and the Problems of Modernity: Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Langston Hughes, Dawahare chose to focus on the issue of American proletarian literature of the thirties as a form of modernism.  He demonstrates that confronted with the Depression, mass movements, and the escalation of fascism around the world, many proletarian writers re-evaluate and adapt the modernist aesthetics of the previous decades and, in the process, create a proletarian modernism sensitive to the conditions of workers, women, and minorities.  As part of his research for the dissertation, Dawahare conducted an extensive interview with Tillie Olsen in 1992.  The interview explores Olsen's relationships to the American literary tradition and the cultural and political milieu of the thirties.  Over the last few years, Dawahare has revised and published a large portion of the dissertation in essay form.

Dawahare's current research extends the work he began in the late 1980s.  His book project, Between Twentieth-Century Nationalisms: African American Literature, 1919-1941, evaluates the profound impact of nationalism and internationalism on black American writers from the Harlem Renaissance and the Proletarian Literary Movement.  Writing within those tempestuous years of economic depression and war, authors from the Harlem Renaissance and the Proletarian Literary Movement, who daily experienced the immediacy of basic political issues in numerous ways, found common cause with ideologies and movements that spoke to their own desires for social equality, validity, and political participation.  Indeed, the twenty years between World War I and World War II were perhaps two of the most politically and culturally vital decades of the twentieth-century for black writers.  One of Dawahare's central arguments is that radical black writers from the 1930s provide an immanent critique of post-war nationalism that still has great value today.

As an Assistant Professor at CSUN, Dawahare teaches twentieth-century American Literature and Literary Theory and Criticism.   He offers courses that integrate canonical and noncanonical texts and endeavor to establish the historical and socio-political contexts in which literary works were produced (as well as the current contexts for their continued and/or renewed reception).   One of Dawahare's teaching strategies is to create critical dialogues between texts that are usually taught in isolation, despite their historical proximity and intertextuality, in order to promote a dynamic and complex view of American literary history.

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