Contrary to previous studies of Tillie Olsen’s writing, Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature analyzes the impact of one of the most important philosophies of the last century, dialectical materialism, on the form and content of Olsen’s fiction. By revealing the unconceptualized dialectics of Olsen’s work and its appreciation by scholars and casual readers, this study achieves a dialectical synthesis that incorporates and extends the insights of and about Olsen in terms of dialectical materialism. By foregrounding Olsen’s dialectical approach, it explains and largely resolves apparent contradictions between her Marxism and feminism; her depictions of class, race, and gender; the literature of her earlier and later periods; and her use of realist and modernist literary forms and techniques. Consequently, this project makes a case for the importance of Olsen’s Marxist education during the “Red Decade” of the 1930s and within the U.S. proletarian literary movement.

"Dawahare (California State Univ., Northridge) examines the work of proletarian writer Tillie Olsen (1912–2007) through the lens of dialectical materialism. He argues persuasively that although Olsen did not participate directly in the proletarian literary debates of the 1930s, as the daughter of socialists from pre-Soviet Russia she had been introduced to “Marxist theoretical orientations,” as he writes in chapter 2, and closely followed those debates in “the major Marxist literary and cultural periodicals.” In the introduction Dawahare explains the “enormous and complicated topic” of dialectical materialism as a historical method of analyzing how and why social change occurs, questions that he sees as central to Olsen’s fiction. He devotes chapter 3 to Tell Me A Riddle (1961), analyzing the stories in that work as “both dialectical materialist metaphors and dialectical representations of working-class life in mid-century America.” The title story, he asserts, focuses on “the struggle between opposing forces of dialectical contradictions that cannot find resolution within the constraints of capitalism.” Dawahare deftly draws on existing scholarship on Olsen, Marxism, and proletarian literature, along with archival sources and an interview he conducted with Olsen in 1992 to underscore Olsen’s engagement with Marxist ideas in her works.



Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." - CHOICE