Just Published! Dr. Jean Lutes on early advice columns

Congratulations to Dr. Jean Lutes, whose article, "Lovelorn Columns: A Genre Scorned," was just published in American Literature, one of the top journals in literary studies. Using Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) to explore a wily, underestimated genre, Dr. Lutes's essay juxtaposes his brutal, brilliant riff on the advice column with readings of the real thing. She reviews the lovelorn column’s distinctive features, situates West’s satiric novella in that context, and then examines the racial dynamics of both the novella and the genre, touching briefly on two careers: that of the well-known Dorothy Dix, who was white, and that of Princess Mysteria, a little-known columnist who was African American. In the process, Dr. Lutes shows that West tells us both more and less about this mass print genre than scholars have allowed. Although he portrays advice columns as a morally bankrupt product of consumer capitalism, they did far more than simply render irrelevant the question of genuine emotional expression. Using a complex masquerade of gender and race, columnists shifted counsel outside the bounds of interpersonal exchange, forged an anonymous, recursive imaginative field, and sometimes even generated glimmers of an ethics of intimacy.