paragraph about
the era of professionalism
Answers
Answer:
PROFESSIONALISM
Spanning the Civil War to the First World War, the rise of American professionalism brought about the model of a modern career: a vocation that claims service, not moneymaking, as its aim; that privileges expertise; that defines and protects systems of education that confer such expertise; and that takes for granted the professional's desire for upward mobility. For writers, the advent of professionalism meant a shift in literary taste from an amateur, romantic, and passively "feminized" style of authorship to one that was typified by training, realism, and traditional masculinity. In 1855 the poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) expressed his idea of artistic inspiration as "I loafe and invite my Soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass" ("Song of myself" ll. 4–5). By 1903, however, in "Getting into Print," an article in the Editor magazine, the novelist and short story writer Jack London (1876–1916) responded, "Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it" (p. 57). Replacing Whitman's reified muse with "something that looks remarkably like it," London's description of authorship reveals professionalism's link to the seemingly unrelated nineteenth-century developments of the steamship, railroad, telegraph, and telephone: technologies of mass communication that created and maintained the literary professions through the buying and selling of words as commodities. Thus, although the progressivist London and his contemporaries favored the reflection of "the real" in writing, at the turn of the twentieth century the profession of literature became increasingly aligned with commercialism—with the look of inspiration instead of its substance. This point is crucial to understanding a central tension for professional authors writing from 1870 to 1920: the tension between high art—intellectual work supposedly performed for social good—and texts that were marketed for individual or corporate profit through systems of mass media.