Reading the Obscene Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature

"In Carroll's hands, the question of obscenity in midcentury literature has a whole new conceptual frame and in the figure of theeditor, a whole new protagonist. Going where few critical works before it have dared to tread, this is a highly persuasive and lucidly readable contribution to twentieth-century American cultural studies."-Mark McGurl, Stanford University "A thoroughly enjoyable examination of the role that literary obscenity played in forging the professional-managerial white male commitment to 'free speech.' Jordan Carroll shows that defending obscene literature enshrined modes of dispassion that served liberals' professional climbing."-Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University "What draws us to the obscene? It's a question scholars rarely ask because the allure of the forbidden seems so obvious. What if, though, for the white male professional-managerial class of the mid-to-late twentieth century, the enticement of the obscene was not so hot but rather cool? What if the point of reading smut was not to indulge in prurient interest but to show oneself capable of overcoming such base impulses? Not to masturbate, but to master? Such is the gambit of Jordan S. Carroll's Reading the Obscene, which charts a bildungsroman of boomer hermeneutics."-Whitney Strub, The Baffler "[I]n his Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature, Jordan S. Carroll is interested in a different, subtler aspect of the era's creeping corporatization. Rather than examining how the economics of publishing affected culture, Carroll considers how its class politics drove the industry's challenges to censorship, asserting that the 'values and training of the professional-managerial class (PMC)' were the driving force behind publishing's challenges to obscenity laws."-Greg Barnhisel, American Literary History "Carroll's surprising argument is that editors trained PMC men in the exigent art of cool detachment through obscenity.... Reading the Obscene teems with telling details and relishes double-entendres."-Dan Sinykin, ASAP/Journal