Keith Gandal – författare

In this book, Gandal reveals how the slum, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, became the source of spectacle as never before (in newspapers, documentary accounts, photographs, and literature), and emerged as a subject for aesthetic, ethnographic, and psychological description. He argues that the development of these new concepts and styles for representing the urban and largely immigrant poor amounted to a revolution in ethics, and provides close readings of Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives and Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.

Gandal contends that The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises and The Sound and the Fury were all written by men who were greatly influenced by their shared frustration of not serving in the American military's colossal war effort. At the same time, these same authors also observed, among other startling developments, the Army's first egalitarian treatment of ethnic or hyphenated-Americans in regard to officer selection. The Great War mobilization shaped large-scale shifts in American life, including the meritocratic assignment of recruits to military rank based on intelligence testing, rather than Anglo-social and family background; an unprecedented military propaganda campaign aimed at fighting venereal disease and the redefinition of masculinity as chaste, chivalrous and athletic; the incarceration of tens of thousands of prostitutes as well as "promiscuous" women in an effort to police American female sexual behavior; and a dramatic but failed effort to ban sexual contact between American troops and French prostitutes. Mobilization Fiction involves a fundamental rethinking of these three novels, as well as other modernist postwar prose of the 1920s and 30s, in view of this essential history of the Great War mobilization.

In this compelling work, Keith Gandal reveals how the slum in nineteenth-century America, long a topic for sober moral analysis, became in the 1890s an unprecedented source of spectacle, captured in novels, newspapers, documentary accounts, and photographs. Reflecting a change in the middle-class vision of the poor, the slum no longer drew attention simply as a problem of social conditions and vice but emerged as a subject for aesthetic, ethnographic, and psychological description. From this period dates the fascination with the "colorful" alternative customs and ethics of slum residents, and an emphasis on nurturing their self-esteem. Middle-class portrayals of slum life as "strange and dangerous" formed part of a broad turn-of-the-century quest for masculinity, Gandal argues, a response to a sentimental Victorian respectability perceived as stifling. These changes in middle-class styles for representing the urban poor signalled a transformation in middle- class ethics and a reconception of subjectivity. Developing a broad cultural context for the 1890s interest in the poor, Gandal also offers close, groundbreaking analysis of two of the period''s crucial texts. Looking at Jacob Riis''s How the Other Half Lives (1890), Gandal documents how Riis''s use of ethnographic and psychological details challenged traditional moralist accounts and helped to invent a spectacular style of documentation that still frames our approach as well as our solutions to urban problems. Stephen Crane''s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) pushed ethnographic and psychological analysis even farther, representing a human interiority centered around self-image as opposed to character and exploring not only different customs but a radically different ethics in New York''s Bowery--what we would call today a "culture of poverty." Gandal meanwhile demonstrates how both Riis''s innovative "touristic" approach and Crane''s "bohemianism" bespeak a romanticization of slum life and an emerging middle-class unease with its own values and virility. With framing discussion that relates slum representations of the 1890s to those of today, and featuring a new account of the Progressive Era response to slum life, The Virtues of the Vicious makes fresh, provocative reading for Americanists and those interested in the 1890s, issues of urban representation and reform, and the history of New York City.

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner stand as the American voice of the Great War. But was it warfare that drove them to write? Not according to Keith Gandal, who argues that the authors'' famous postwar novels were motivated not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These ''quintessential'' male American novelists of the 1920s were all, for different reasons, deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command. As a result, Gandal contends, they felt themselves emasculated--not, as the usual story goes, due to their encounters with trench warfare, but because they got nowhere near the real action. Bringing to light previously unexamined Army records, including new information about the intelligence tests, The Gun and the Pen demonstrates that the authors'' frustrated military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of the unprecedented U.S. mobilization for the Great War, a radical effort to transform the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not to racial difference). For these Lost Generation writers, the humiliating failure vis-à-vis the Army meant an embarrassment before women and an inability to compete successfully in a rising social order, against a new set of people. The Gun and the Pen restores these seminal novels to their proper historical context and offers a major revision of our understanding of America''s postwar literature.

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner stand as the American voice of the Great War. But was it warfare that drove them to write? Not according to Keith Gandal, who argues that the authors'' famous postwar novels were motivated not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These ''quintessential'' male American novelists of the 1920s were all, for different reasons, deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command. As a result, Gandal contends, they felt themselves emasculated--not, as the usual story goes, due to their encounters with trench warfare, but because they got nowhere near the real action. Bringing to light previously unexamined Army records, including new information about the intelligence tests, The Gun and the Pen demonstrates that the authors'' frustrated military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of the unprecedented U.S. mobilization for the Great War, a radical effort to transform the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not to racial difference). For these Lost Generation writers, the humiliating failure vis-à-vis the Army meant an embarrassment before women and an inability to compete successfully in a rising social order, against a new set of people. The Gun and the Pen restores these seminal novels to their proper historical context and offers a major revision of our understanding of America''s postwar literature.

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner stand as the American voice of the Great War. But was it warfare that drove them to write? Not according to Keith Gandal, who argues that the authors' famous postwar novels were motivated not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These 'quintessential' male American novelists of the 1920s were all, for different reasons, deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command. As a result, Gandal contends, they felt themselves emasculated--not, as the usual story goes, due to their encounters with trench warfare, but because they got nowhere near the real action. Bringing to light previously unexamined Army records, including new information about the intelligence tests, The Gun and the Pen demonstrates that the authors' frustrated military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of the unprecedented U.S. mobilization for the Great War, a radical effort to transform the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not to racial difference). For these Lost Generation writers, the humiliating failure vis-à-vis the Army meant an embarrassment before women and an inability to compete successfully in a rising social order, against a new set of people. The Gun and the Pen restores these seminal novels to their proper historical context and offers a major revision of our understanding of America's postwar literature.

Firsthand is an exploration—both suspenseful and comic—of the creative process in research writing. The book takes the reader through the ins and outs of a specific research journey, from combing through libraries and archives to the intellectual challenges involved with processing information that contradicts established ideas. More fundamentally, it addresses the somewhat mysterious portion of the intellectual process: the creative and serendipitous aspects involved in arriving at a fruitful research question in the first place.Keith Gandal combines this scholarly detective story with a comic personal narrative about how a midlife crisis accidentally sent him on a journey to write a research monograph that many in his profession—including at times himself—were dubious about. While researching how Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner faced their forgotten crises of masculinity, Gandal discovers that his own crisis is instrumental to his creative process. Incorporating stories from Gandal’s comic romp through the hyper-competitive world of middle-aged men’s tennis, adopting pitbulls, and discussing Michel Foucault, Firsthand gives readers an inside look at how to acquire accurate knowledge—about the world, about history, and about oneself.

Firsthand is an exploration—both suspenseful and comic—of the creative process in research writing. The book takes the reader through the ins and outs of a specific research journey, from combing through libraries and archives to the intellectual challenges involved with processing information that contradicts established ideas. More fundamentally, it addresses the somewhat mysterious portion of the intellectual process: the creative and serendipitous aspects involved in arriving at a fruitful research question in the first place.Keith Gandal combines this scholarly detective story with a comic personal narrative about how a midlife crisis accidentally sent him on a journey to write a research monograph that many in his profession—including at times himself—were dubious about. While researching how Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner faced their forgotten crises of masculinity, Gandal discovers that his own crisis is instrumental to his creative process. Incorporating stories from Gandal’s comic romp through the hyper-competitive world of middle-aged men’s tennis, adopting pitbulls, and discussing Michel Foucault, Firsthand gives readers an inside look at how to acquire accurate knowledge—about the world, about history, and about oneself.

Firsthand is an exploration—both suspenseful and comic—of the creative process in research writing. The book takes the reader through the ins and outs of a specific research journey, from combing through libraries and archives to the intellectual challenges involved with processing information that contradicts established ideas. More fundamentally, it addresses the somewhat mysterious portion of the intellectual process: the creative and serendipitous aspects involved in arriving at a fruitful research question in the first place.   Keith Gandal combines this scholarly detective story with a comic personal narrative about how a midlife crisis accidentally sent him on a journey to write a research monograph that many in his profession—including at times himself—were dubious about. While researching how Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner faced their forgotten crises of masculinity, Gandal discovers that his own crisis is instrumental to his creative process. Incorporating stories from Gandal’s comic romp through the hyper-competitive world of middle-aged men’s tennis, adopting pitbulls, and discussing Michel Foucault, Firsthand gives readers an inside look at how to acquire accurate knowledge—about the world, about history, and about oneself.

A vigorous reappraisal of American literature inspired by the First World War.American World War I literature has long been interpreted as an alienated outcry against modern warfare and government propaganda. This prevailing reading ignores the US army’s unprecedented attempt during World War I to assign men—except, notoriously, African Americans—to positions and ranks based on merit. And it misses the fact that the culture granted masculinity only to combatants, while the noncombatant majority of doughboys experienced a different alienation: that of shame.Drawing on military archives, current research by social-military historians, and his own readings of thirteen major writers, Keith Gandal seeks to put American literature written after the Great War in its proper context—as a response to the shocks of war and meritocracy. The supposedly antiwar texts of noncombatant Lost Generation authors Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cummings, and Faulkner addressed—often in coded ways—the noncombatant failure to measure up. Gandal also examines combat-soldier writers William March, Thomas Boyd, Laurence Stallings, and Hervey Allen. Their works are considered straight-forward antiwar narratives, but they are in addition shaped by experiences of meritocratic recognition, especially meaningful for socially disadvantaged men. Gandal furthermore contextualizes the sole World War I novel by an African American veteran, Victor Daly, revealing a complex experience of both army discrimination and empowerment among the French. Finally, Gandal explores three women writers—Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, and Ellen La Motte—who saw the war create frontline opportunities for women while allowing them to be arbiters of masculinity at home. Ultimately, War Isn’t the Only Hell shows how American World War I literature registered the profound ways in which new military practices and a foreign war unsettled traditional American hierarchies of class, ethnicity, gender, and even race.