Artistic aspiration in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie remains market desire in disguise

Evidence

The narrower argument turns on the character of Ames and on the question of whether the artistic ambitions he inspires in Carrie are to be read as a radical break with her earlier and more “materialistic” impulses. Michaels argues that they are not, and I think he is right, but the argument is instructively formulated: “The ideal that Ames represents to Carrie is thus an ideal of dissatisfaction, of perpetual desire” (GS42). We never do get out of commodity lust in Dreiser; there is no “alternate vision”; no counterimpulse can be sensed; no experience remains uncontaminated by it; nothing negates this omnipresent element, which Michaels equally rightly identifies as “the market.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 456

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is a key move in defining the cultural logic: the market colonizes even the apparent escape routes of art and idealism.