The papers gathered in this panel interrogate the state of professionalism in the United States as reflected in contemporary works of literature. The panelists are especially interested in the twenty-first century fate of what sociologist Steven Brint calls "public-trustee professionalism": expert work guided "by an appreciation of the important social ends it serves." This form of professionalism, most often linked to the welfare state and to fields like social work and medicine, has withered away under the impact of neoliberalism. However, its ghost lingers on, especially in the literary field and in the humanities and social sciences, where writers and scholars continue to be torn between the competing demands of commerce and public service.
Sean McCann, the first panelist, explores recent literary non-fiction by Rachel Snyder and others, in which professional writers describe their encounters with the criminal justice system. Works like No Visible Bruises; College in Prison; Hummingbird in Underworld; Words No Bars Can Hold; Doing Time, Writing Lives; and Reading with Patrick focus on prison education and turn on the way that the injustice of mass incarceration renders literary expression newly meaningful, rescuing the writers from an anxiety about the privilege and triviality of their careers. This paper discusses these narratives of professional redemption in relation to the contemporaneous crisis in journalistic and academic employment, considering why the failures of the criminal justice system, and an encounter with its victims, become the means for writers to reimagine the value of their work.
Stephen Schryer turns to Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys (2019), in which Elwood Curtis, a would-be Black professional, dies while escaping from a a sadistic reform school. Elwood's identity is taken over by his working-class friend, Jack Turner, who flees North to start a new life as the owner of a Harlem moving company. Through this narrative substitution, Whitehead mourns the death of a model of Black professionalism that shaped the Black middle class from Du Bois until the Civil Rights era, one in which idealistic and well-educated leaders speak to the national conscience, This model is replaced by an entrepreneurial model in which Black capitalists profit from American racism. At the same time, Whitehead allegorizes a generational shift in Black authorship, as writers like Whitehead become increasingly aware of their entrepreneurial positioning within the culture industry.
Lastly, Mary Esteve explores the mid-1990s rise of critical infrastructure studies, as refracted through E. L. Doctorow's 1994 neo-noir historical novel, Waterworks. The novel is told from the perspective of a professional newspaperman at the turn of the century who, 30 years earlier, was involved in uncovering a medical scientist's nefarious use of New York's waterworks system. The 30-year interval enables Doctorow to have his narrator supplement reportage with critical reflections on modernity's industrial culture. In his orientation toward the waterworks, the narrator looks decidedly less like a 19th-century newspaperman than one of Doctorow's professional contemporaries in the 1990s, that is, like an anthropologist who has trained his sights on infrastructure and has developed a specific methodology for doing so. Through this twin focus on literature and critical infrastructure studies, Esteve explores the centrality of professionals' relationship to public works.