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The Storyteller, the Novelist, and the Advice Columnist:
Narrative and Mass Culture in
"Miss Lonelyhearts"
Author(s): Rita Barnard
Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Autumn,
1993), pp. 40-61
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345980
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The Storyteller, the Novelist,
and the Advice Columnist:
Narrative and Mass Culture
in Miss Lonelyhearts
RITA BARNARD
In 1936 the American critic Henry Seidel Canby observed that
it was "folly to
suppose that a society which reads a daily paper, sees a news
reel weekly, and
hears the radio every other hour, is going to be novelized
successfully by the
old-time story teller ... " (Luccock, 153). The remark, coming
in the midst of the
depression decade, captures a widespread anxiety about the
culture of moder-
nity, or, more exactly, culture in the face of modernity. 1
Indeed, the same anx-
ious premise--that new structures of experience require new
forms of narrative,
or that such experiences might render narrative itself obsolete-
informs the
two texts I would like to submit to a mutual critique: Nathanael
West's 1933
novella Miss Lonelyhearts, and Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay
"The Storyteller:
Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov."
The thematic similarity between the novella and the critical
essay has thus
far escaped critical comment, perhaps because of differences in

genre and tone,
not to mention the authors' nationalities. Yet the connection is
quite striking,
especially since both West and Benjamin place the apparently
mundane ques-
tion of advice at the center of their investigations of the
purpose and value of
narrative and, more broadly, of art in the modern world. Miss
Lonelyhearts ex-
amines the fate of the newspaper advice-columnist who has no
counsel for his
readers: a man who wanders through an urban wasteland of
dismal pawnshops,
scruffy parks, and torn advertising posters, in search of some
trace of redemp-
tive meaning. Miss Lonelyhearts also engages a self-reflexive
formal problem
(since behind the figure of the failed advice-columnist there
surely stands the
figure of the failed novelist). It confronts, as Jonathan Raban
has put it, "the
possibility that the conventions of the Novel ... have been made
unworkable by
the urban industrial world of pulp and cheapjack commodities"
(222). "The
Storyteller," in which Benjamin spins a kind of three-ply
history of narrative
forms, structures of experience, and modes of production,
addresses the identical
set of problems, namely the loss of advice and the attenuation
of older "epic"
forms-the story and the novel. Benjamin's essay provides a
useful perspective
from which we may consider the theoretical and cultural
implications of
West's novella; conversely, the novella allows us to explore the

possibilities
The author wishes to thank Peter Conn and Dana Phillips for
their helpful comments on this paper.
Historians and sociologists from the 1930s frequently resorted
to the term "cultural lag" to account for this perceived social
crisis. The phrase expresses a concern about people's capacity
to deal with the pace of change--a sense that the human
culture as well as the individual experience was in some sense
incommensurate with material conditions (Susman, 156;
Luccock, 153).
2018 18:57:51 UTC
RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYTELLING 41
and limitatations entailed in applying Benjamins' essay to the
American scene.
I therefore propose to read these two texts in juxtaposition so
as to to re-examine
their understanding of the relationship-key to our
understanding of the rela-
tionship between modernism and post-modernism--between
literature and
mass-mediated culture.
I: Stories
For Benjamin the demise of the "old-fashioned storyteller" is a
symptom of
alienation in the modern world:

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the
ability to tell a tale
properly.... It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us,
the securest
among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to
exchange experi-
ences.... [T]he storyteller is a man who has counsel for his
readers. But if today
"having counsel" is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring,
this is because the
communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence
we have no coun-
sel either for ourselves or for others. (83, 86)
People are no longer able to seek counsel, or so Benjamin
argues, since to do so one
must at least be able to begin narrating the story for which the
storyteller's ad-
vice provides the unfolding and the moral. Advice, in other
words, is predi-
cated on shared and spoken experiences, on significance
immanent in the very
fabric of daily life. Where these are lost, the story-and even the
novel
(described in the essay as an heroic effort to distill meaning
from increasingly
private and meaningless lives)-shatters into short-lived bits of
"information": snippets of narrative, incapable of surviving the
moment in
which they are new. In a standardized, mechanized world, the
"moral of the
story" (the product of the teller's ready supply of personal
wisdom) and even
"the meaning of life" (the product of the novelist's troubled
artistic quest) be-

come increasingly hard to discover. This difficulty is evidence,
for Benjamin, of
the fragmentation of experience, and of an historically new
menace to older
narrative modes of "producing" that experience. This menace is
information,
and specifically the newspaper, which stands here as a
synecdoche for mass
culture in general. 2
This much is familiar to all readers of Benjamin. I would,
however, like to
emphasize the fact that, though this essay is nostalgic and
concerned to evoke
for us a (perhaps imagined) pre-capitalist "organic"
community, it is also very
much a text of the 1930s. It speaks urgently (though
incompletely) to certain
pressing cultural concerns of its time-concerns which evidently
crossed na-
tional borders. The work of American social historians offers
both empirical
and subjective support for Benjamin's sense that "'having
counsel' is beginning to
have an old-fashioned ring." Roland Marchand, for example,
has listed sev-
2 realize that many contemporary cultural critics are
uncomfortable with the use of the term "mass culture," since it
has
come to seem so irredeemably tainted with an elitist and self-
congratulatory gloom. I retain it here partly for the sake of its
period flavor. It is after all a term that emerges from the
thirties (Brantlinger 30); moreover, the two texts I am
discussing
here do express something of the apocalyptic pessimism

associated with the term.
2018 18:57:51 UTC
42 NOVEL I FALL 1993
eral broad social and demographic changes (all relating to the
demise of
smaller communities under the impact of a consolidating
national market)
which by the twenties and thirties had created what he calls an
"advice vac-
uum": greater mobility, generational discontinuity, the
isolation and shrinking
of households in the new apartments and suburbs, and so forth.
All of these
trends, he notes, tended to sever city dwellers from the shared
forms of knowl-
edge of smaller communities, and to disrupt the "informal,
intrafamilial and
intracommunity channels of advice" (342).
The advent of the Great Depression, moreover, with its gigantic
statistics,
and its vast, yet incomprehensible ravages of the old
certainties, extended this
disconcerting experience also to smaller and rural communities.
A passage from
the Austrian economist, Peter Drucker, which is often picked
up by American
historians and memoirists of the period describes the emotional
and subjective

effects of the economic crisis as follows:
Depression shows man as a senseless cog in a senselessly
whirling machine
which is beyond human understanding and has ceased to serve
any purpose
but its own (Allen, 55) ... He can no longer explain or
understand his existence
as rationally correlated and co-ordinated to the world in which
he lives; nor
can he co-ordinate the world and the social realities to his
existence. The func-
tion of the individual in society has become entirely irrational
and senseless.
Man is isolated within a tremendous scene. (Kazin, 357)
This description strikes me as similar in its implications to
Benjamin's memo-
rable evocation of the individual's bafflement on the
battlefields of Flanders:
A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar
now stood un-
der the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained
unchanged but
the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of
destructive torrents
and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (84)
The illogical enormities of modernity, implicit in such things
as mechanical
warfare, rampant inflation, or, in the U.S., the absurdities of
poverty in a land
of plenty, would seem to defy the interpretative and
communicative equipment
of the individual, and to attest powerfully to Benjamin's

proposition that per-
sonal "experience has fallen in value" (83-84).
This melancholy observation does not, however, tell the whole
story. A
glance at popular magazines from the early and mid-thirties
would offer am-
ple evidence that a concern with advice, with the voice of
experience, had by
no means disappeared. Every few pages or so, one discovers
documents such as
the following advertisement, which appeared in the Ladies
Home Journal of
March 1931 (and is reproduced in Marchand's richly illustrated
history):
Dear Miss Dix:
"How can I make myself more popular? I am fairly pretty and
not a dumb-bell,
2018 18:57:51 UTC
RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYTELIUNG 43
but I am so timid and self-conscious with people, men
especially ... I'm always
sure they're not going to like me ...
Joan G-----"
ANSWER: "Poor Joan--you have an inferiority complex haven't

you? Yet no
woman need feel inferior ... Feel that you're charming, Joan,
and others will
find you so!"
Pretty clothes will help you tremendously ... Buy the loveliest
lingerie you can
... [And] if you use that wonderful product, Lux, you'll keep
your dainty gar-
ments COLOR FRESH and NEW a long, long, time.... Your
surroundings,
too, can help you win self-confidence and poise. Pretty
curtains, gay sofa
cushions, table linens--all can form part of the magic spell if
kept lovely with
Lux.
Dorothy Dix (354)
The popular journals also contained advice-texts of a more
distinctly narrative
variety, such as "Mother Minds her Business" from the
Saturday Evening Post
(27 January, 1934: 46):
lMOTHER MIIONDS HEIR BUSINESS
OU CANT CONM Ovtl
voullt C"_ T(LL
wMOt(R WWAmf WONmC
/AW MASWIR 9I
/
mOGEm, IT 1MY BUSNISS!

I KNOW Sm[s M APPPILY MARRIOD'
BUTr TMER IS OumTnING.
Ev NOTICED HE ...
/
I ADORE HwIMMOTHRf Itt
ONLY THAT... SOMETIMES...
AND TONIGHT IT WAS
(SPECIALLY NOTICEABLE.
I WAS SO ASHANEDO
I SUSPECTED '8 0O
WAS THE TROUBLE.
WHY HAVENT YOU
WARNED HIM ?
O.H MOTHER, I WAVE. !
THAT IS, I TRIED TO HINT
GENTLY. SO AS NOT TO
HURT HIS rIELINGS.BUT
HE THOUGHT I WAS 'KING
THEN QUIETLY GO AHEAD
AND GET SOME UIrEBUO PCRWAPSO OURCi RIGHT. G0
O OvN R
I'M GLAD YOU GOT TWIS LIrEBUOY,
ANN SUCH LAT[wPMAE YOUV 0 rilL
L! IfAAN? I AND MAYS[ IT IS
JUST AS WILL IOY TO TAK[ ANY
CHANC[S WITM*O0*

NO"B.O.'NOW_ &k b
THCEIS ONE MAARIAEG
THtaL LAST GUESS THE
CPLDff GOES TO YOU, DEAR
SYOULL HAVE TO ADMIT I WAS MINDING
MY BUSINESS-.A MOT.rPS BUSINESS,!
Ku *;-W
I LOVE THE WAY IT FRESHENS
AND SOOTHES MY SKIN /
W /OMEN who really t.r.uth,, eir complexions rve about
LAfbuoy. And you can't blame rthem' Fr iUfebuov's
bland, soothing lathrr ,/r<p-M/.an, FrcX s ofclogged impurities
that dull and cloud the skin It freshens complexions-
quickly brings the clear radiance and sparklng glow of health.
"B.O."-our common enemy
Public enemy number one-that's
"D. 0. (Laedy odor).' It threatens
every one of us. For we all perspre
a quart daily. Overheid rooms
increase the danger of offendin.g.
Play safe-bathe regularly with
Lifebuoy. You can tell by its x.ra.
dlean, quickly.vanishing scent that
Lifebuoy Ilther purifies and deo.
dorizes the pores- stops B. 0."
1 I

""--I'
L?
U
2018 18:57:51 UTC
Though ephemeral and silly compared to Benjamin's
astonishingly compact
and lyrical essay, these texts are, arguably, of equal importance
for a history of
narrative and structures of experience. They remind us quite
vividly that ad-
vice, stories, and the speaking voice-far from being on the
decline-had in
fact become a growth industry. Americans, as Marchand
records, could seek ad-
vice not only from Miss Dix, but from such figures as "Ruth
Miller," the friendly
voice of Odo-ro-no, or "Mary Hale Martin" of Libby's, or
"Aunt Ellen" (of
Griswold Cast Iron Cooking Utensils). They could savor the
folksy tone and the
atmosphere of Gemeinschaft evoked by advertisements: a
consumer could take
up the invitation of the Sears and Roebuck company (offered in
their pitch to
rural radio listeners) to "pull up a chair and talk things over ...
"; or they could

rely on the homey Betty Crocker, invented by corporate fiat to
answer those
"questions that in more neighborly communities had been asked
over the back
fence." Nor was the spoken voice entirely lost: audiences could
tune in to a radio
program entitled "The Voice of Experience," which offered the
audience advice
on intimate matters, and, on a single day in 1933, received
6,500 letters from its
listeners (353-57). 3
It would appear, in short, that the value of experience did not,
in fact, fall
straight into "bottomlessness" as Benjamin theorizes (84), but
that personal ex-
perience, as well as old-fashioned advice, was instead
resuscitated-sublated,
if you will-in a corporate and commodified guise. There is a
certain historical
irony, as Marchand points out, in the fact that the language that
served to
promote and maintain a complex system of standardized mass
distribution, was
everything but abstract and mechanical, but relied, on the
contrary, on a
"person-to-person, conversational tone of voice that belied the
very nature of
mass communications" (336). This ironic possibility is not
accounted for in "The
Storyteller," with its lament for the disappearance of the
spoken voice, for the
personal touch, and for the pragmatic wisdom of advice. The
problem can be
traced back to the logic of Benjamin's synecdoche: the fact that
(at least in the

essay in question), he takes the demystifying, de-auraticizing
institution of the
newspaper as the paradigmatic form of mass culture. 4
It is perhaps then necessary to find a second paradigm: one
which could ac-
count not only for the loss of the authentic voice of the
storyteller, but also for
the reinvention and simulation of authenticity-the
commercialized survival
Lawrence Levine has recently argued that the popular culture
of the thirties--including the many stories broadcast on the
radio, and which people often retold to each other--can be
viewed (at least hypothetically) as the folklore of industrial
society (1376-79). His democratically-minded reading stresses
a kind of historical and cultural continuity; it offers
precisely the sort of optimistic, progressive, linear
historiographic narrative that Benjamin was determined to stop
in its
tracks.
In the more politically optimistic essay, "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," the paradigmatic forms
are, of course, photography or film. It is interesting, however,
that in both of these major essays Benjamin seems, perhaps
deliberately, to shy away from any comment on advertising, a
form which for other critics (F. R. Leavis, for instance) has
seemed to epitomize the industrial transformation of speech
communities. Indeed, one of Theodor Adorno's important
arguments with Benjamin concerned his failure to account for
the possibility of commercial remystification: the re-
auraticization of the image, most notably of the movie
celebrity. This is not to say that Benjamin was unaware of the
importance of advertising. In One Way Street, for example, he
contrasts the newspaper, which we read vertically, with the

billboard advertisement, which we read in the "dictatorial" and
auratic "perpendicular" (Reflections, 78). Moreover, his
fascination with commodities on display, department stores,
exhibitions, and so forth, in the Arcades Project, should be seen
as an exploration of the history of advertising as an element of
our everyday life and urban geography. See also Wicke, 9-13,
for a more detailed discussion of these matters; and, on the
Adorno-Benjamin debate, Buck-Morss, Origin, Chapter 9.
2018 18:57:51 UTC
RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORY~ELUNG 45
of traditional forms in the mass-mediated culture of the time. s
I suggest that
we turn to the genre represented by the second of the popular
documents repro-
duced above: the comic strip advertisement. The form seems
particularly suited
to the purposes of this essay for several reasons-not least the
fact that
Nathanael West originally intended to write Miss Lonelyhearts
as a novel in
the form of a comic strip, with dialogue in speech balloons
("Some Notes on
Miss L," 66). The comic strip ads, with their now-familiar
"mini-dramas of
love-lost-and-regained through the conquest of B.O.," of
marriages saved by
Wonder Bread, and of academic success ensured by the
energizing powers of
Ovaltine, emerged at almost the exact time that West was

writing his novella
(Marchand, 111). In 1931, after one of the earliest Gallop polls
revealed the
enormous popularity of comics and the "advice to the lovelorn"
columns, adver-
tising agencies quickly found a way to combine the two forms,
and soon inun-
dated the pages of newspapers and popular magazines with this
undignified
new addition to the genealogy of epic forms. The genre became
so popular that
the early to mid-thirties came to be known, among admen, as
"the balloon talk
period" (Marchand, 304). But more important for their
paradigmatic status
than their sheer numbers, is the manner in which such
narratives managed to
combine and condense the characteristic formal devices of all
the mass media
(in the same way, perhaps, that MTV, in recent years, has
appeared to be the
paradigmatic "postmodern" form, combining and condensing
popular music,
video, advertising, fashion spreads, and tropes from any
number of fictional or
cinematic genres). The comic-strip itself, as Marchand notes,
was already a
kind of formal compendium:
From the movies came the ideas of continuity of action,
quickcutting from scene
to scene, and focusing attention through the occasional close-
up. From the
confession magazines came the power of personal testimony
and the intimate

drama. From the tabloids came an emphasis on brevity and
pictorial imagery.
And from the radio came the persuasiveness of a conversational
style and the
seductiveness of eavesdropping. (112)
To all these features, the "continuity series" ads (as they were
called in the
trade) added the ready-made solutions of advertising. Their
plots, even more
unvaried than those of the soaps (another of the decade's
generic inventions),
always delivered the same happy message: that a panacea for
all our troubles
is available, and can be purchased, neatly packaged, in the
form of a commod-
ity. 6
The comic-strip ad, then, serves as a reminder that mass culture
cannot be
theorized only in terms of the fragmentation and "de-
auraticization" of narra-
tive and experience. It does not, however, completely
invalidate Benjamin's
analysis in "The Storyteller." Such symbolic representations of,
or substitutions
for, the traditional advice-giver's role and the lost
neighborliness of older
For a recent essay criticizing Benjamin on somewhat similar
grounds see Angus, 99.
6 One of the first studies of the soaps is that of Herta Herzog
(1941), which gives the following formula for the genre:
"getting
into trouble and out again" (66).

2018 18:57:51 UTC
communities may also serve as signs of their social absence,
just as (in
Benjamin's view) the novel's attempt to discover "the meaning
of life" is an in-
dex of the loss of immanent meaning in daily life. We cannot
equate the growth
of an advice industry, controlled and designed from above,
with the
"handcrafted" counsel of the storyteller, nor the speech-balloon
with the spo-
ken voice, nor the advertising slogan with the moral of the
story. After all, the
story, as Benjamin describes it, stands for a utopian idea of a
lived totality: a
narrative form so connected to daily labor, so "woven into the
fabric of real
life," that it hardly seems ideological in its meaning and effect.
7 The nostalgic
reinvention of homey advice and Gemeinschaft in the American
media must by
contrast seem almost a matter of "false consciousness" (one
hesitates to use the
phrase, but this is, I think, where the essay's positions
implicitly lead us). And
while "The Storyteller" is also in a sense nostalgic, its
nostalgia serves a dif-

ferent purpose: to emphasize what has been lost; to offer not
consolation, but
critique. 8
These preliminary meditations, then, offer us two ways of
looking at mass
culture. The first is the dystopian perspective suggested by the
newspaper,
characterized by the fragmentation, standardization, and loss of
whatever
once carried the authoritative stamp of the personal, the
unique, the genuine,
the handmade. The second is the ostensibly utopian narrative of
the comic-
strip ad: characterized not so much by the loss, but the
simulation of the story-
teller's authentic personal wisdom (the slogan, for instance)
and voice (the
speech balloon). The importance of Miss Lonelyhearts lies in
the fact that it de-
ploys both of these heuristic paradigms: it can be read via the
cultural critique
of "The Storyteller" (which will be my concern in the next
section); but it also
casts some light on those aspects of the history of advice-its
commodification
and mass-distribution-which the Benjamin essay leaves
unexplored (and to
which I will turn anon).
II: Newspapers
That West was deeply concerned with the intertwined
phenomena of experi-
ence, narrative, and mass culture is evident in his extant scraps
of criticism. In

7 Althusserian notions of ideology of course render this
formulation problematic. But I venture it nevertheless, since it
seems to me that Benjamin is here trying to imagine, as a kind
of normative touchstone, a relation to the real that is not
imaginary, but directly lived, inherently meaningful. Our sense
of the impossibility of such an unmediated meaning is
perhaps an index of its profoundly utopian dimension.
T.J. Jackson Lears offers a fascinating-and I would say very
Benjaminian-discussion of the uses of nostalgia in his essay,
"Packaging the Folk," which explores the prevalence of folksy
images in the advertising of the 1930s. Though he does not
discuss the contuinuity series ads, his research raises exactly
the same issues I am concerned with here:
(W)hen the folk were invoked, the advertisers implicitly denied
any rupture beteen tradition and modernity, trivialized the
challenge of the past to the present, and ignored the destructive
effects of change. Their outlook resembled the evolutionary
progressiveness of Teilhard de Chardin, whose slogan they
would have loved, if they had ever read it: "Nothing is ever lost
to
the race."
The denial of loss is not "nostalgia" but the erasure of its basis-
-and what may, indeed, be the basis of all historical memory
under modern cultural conditions the sense of the pastness of
the past, the radical disjuncture between "then" and "now"
(136).
The renewed experience of this disjuncture is exactly what
Benjamin would have us feel. See also Robin D.G. Kelley's
essay for a discussion of the dangers of merely collapsing the
"boundaries between orality and technology," a collapse

which occurs when one equates the radio voice with that of the
storyteller (1404).
2018 18:57:51 UTC
"Some Notes on Violence," published in Contact in 1932, he
suggests that daily
life in contemporary America has rendered older forms of
narrative problem-
atic. In American cities, he observes, "violence is idiomatic"
(the ambiguous
phrase fittingly conflating the experience, and the expression
or linguistic pro-
duction of that experience). His evidence is to be found in the
newspapers:
To make the front page a murderer has to use his imagination,
he also has to
use a particularly hideous instrument. Take this morning's
paper: FATHER
CUTS SON'S THROAT IN BASEBALL ARGUMENT. It
appears on an in-
side page. To make the first page, he should have killed three
sons and with a
baseball bat instead of a knife. Only liberality and symmetry
could have made
this daily occurrence interesting. (50)
Among the casualties of this sensational processing of violent
experience are

the received conventions of the novel: "Artistic truth," West
announces, no
longer requires "the naturalism of Zola," or "the realism of
Flaubert." The id-
iom of the mass media, as well as the idiom of everyday
experience, has made
the psychological verisimilitude of the nineteeth-century
European novel ap-
pear overwrought: an American, drilled in the shock of
contemporary living by
the daily assault of headlines, would respond to such writing
(or so West imag-
ines) as inaccurate and inappropriate ("'What's all the
excitement about'"), or
as belonging to a purely aesthetic category-as a matter of style
without any
referential urgency ("'By God, that's a mighty fine piece of
writing, that's art"'
[51]).
These insights correspond closely to Benjamin's sense that
contemporary ex-
perience no longer lends itself to the story or the novel, and,
conversely, that our
very capacity for experience is undermined by the mass-
produced forms of nar-
rative that confront us daily in the headlines. The same ideas
are thematized
in Miss Lonelyhearts, which we might usefully think of as the
photographic
negative of "The Storyteller." The urban wasteland in which
the novella is set,
for instance, is in every detail the antithesis of that older
organic community
which Benjamin associates with storytelling. The "multiple"
chaos of West's

city street resists interpretation, and permits only those
fragmentary, desul-
tory, disjointed experiences which Benjamin elsewhere
describes as "urban
shock":
Broken groups of people hurried past, forming neither stars nor
squares. The
lamp-posts were badly spaced and the flagging was of different
sizes. Nor could
he do anything with the harsh clanging sound of street cars and
the raw shouts
of hucksters. No repeated group of words would fit their
rhythm and no scale
could give them meaning. (11)
This sensory assault offers no material for narrative, no
continuity, no distance,
no aura: the city is figured as a "world of doorknobs," replete
with impersonal,
mass-produced objects (9). It is a "dead world," from which
any trace of the
2018 18:57:51 UTC
magic and miracle that empower the storyteller's craft has fled-
-displaced, as
a telling passage suggests, by the newspaper:
[T]he gray sky looked as if it had been rubbed with a soiled

eraser. It held no
angels, flaming crosses, olive-bearing doves, wheels within
wheels. Only a
newspaper struggled in the air like a kite with a broken spine.
(5)
In a similarly gloomy observation of the urban scene, the
sensational "events of
the day" seem to produce not stories, but headlines,
emblazoned on posters:
"Mother slays five with ax, slays seven, slays nine ... Babe
slams two, slams
three ... " (25). The repetitive phrases suggest that even these
sensational
events are no different from those frustratingly banal
"doorknobs": standard-
ized, fungible, infinitely replicable. News resembles mass-
produced goods, not
the handcrafted items to which Benjamin compares the story:
the clay pot to
which the handprint of the potter still clings (92). It is thus
uncannily appro-
priate that West describes his newsmen (who could be seen as
the modem coun-
terparts of the storyteller) as machines, which relentlessly
destroy the indi-
vidual qualities of whatever experiences come their way. The
cynical journal-
ists, as Miss Lonelyhearts observes, are "machines for making
jokes": "A button
machine makes buttons, no matter what the power used, foot,
steam, or electric-
ity. They, no matter what the motivating force, death, love or
God, made
jokes" (15). And though Miss Lonelyhearts himself no longer
willingly partici-

pates in this manufacture (realizing that his own life has also
been reduced to a
punch-line), he cannot, as it were, change the whole mode of
narrative produc-
tion.
Of all the newsmen in the novel, it is of course Miss L. himself
who invites
the most sustained comparison with Benjamin's exemplary
figure; indeed, the
idea of the photographic negative and its positive imprint again
seems apt.
The storyteller is the positive image of the "man who has
counsel for his read-
ers," whose ability to articulate the unity of his own life
imbues experience
with a unique meaning, while also ensuring its public
usefulness and relevance.
He is a kind of secular saint: "the righteous man" who can
reach into the
depths of the inanimate, and perceive the "natural prophecy"
and order of the
created world; a man of "incomparable aura," the imagined
touchstone for a cri-
tique of modern life (107-9). The confused advice columnist, in
contrast, is the
quintessential modem man, who (not unlike Benjamin's
novelist) can record only
the "profound perplexity of the living" (87). He has no identity,
no name other
than the female nom de plume his job forces him to assume.
His life, as pre-
sented in West's jagged narrative, is episodic; and he can find
no words, offer no
advice that has not already been mass-produced. However much
he might

search for a "sincere answer," his position at the New York
Post Dispatch dooms
him to be an impostor: he is, ironically, employed to provide
counsel by the
very institution that menaces the ability to give counsel and to
"produce" expe-
rience in anything other than the standardized form of
information (or, as West
suggests, the joke).
2018 18:57:51 UTC
The comparison enables us to historicize Miss Lonelyhearts'
predicament and
understand West's implicit cultural criticism. The advice
columnist's failure is
not to be understood as personal; the storyteller, as Benjamin's
explicit as-
sociation of the figure with traditional communities
underscores, can only oper-
ate in a context where everybody tells stories: his advice is
after all only "a
proposition" concerning a life-story related to him by
somebody else. Such a
context is clearly not provided by the city, where the zombie-
like crowds-who
walk in "a dreamlike violence," stumble into movie theaters,
and grab love-
story magazines from the garbage cans-have "torn mouths,"a
symbolic detail

emphasizing the alienation of the masses even from any
expressive capacity
(39). The absense of stories, of exchanged experiences, is not
only metaphori-
cally suggested, but explicitly assserted in the text. In one of
the nastier
episodes, Miss Lonelyhearts tries to get the "Clean Old Man"
he discovers lurk-
ing in the men's room to produce some sort of confession:
"Tell us the story of your life," he said, loading his voice with
sympathy.
"I have no story."
"You must have. Every one has a life story."
The old man began to sob.
"Yes, I know, your tale is a sad one. Tell it, damn you, tell it."
When the old man remained silent, he took his arm and twisted
it ... He was
twisting the arms of all the sick and miserable, broken and
betrayed, inarticu-
late and impotent. He was twisting the arm of Desperate,
Broken-Hearted,
Sick-of-it-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband. (17-18)
This desperate violence makes perfect sense if we recall the
social dimension of
stories and advice underscored so strongly in "The Storyteller":
Miss
Lonelyhearts is, in effect trying to restore by force the
community of narrative
exchange in which his archaic role as advice-giver would no
longer amount to
fraud. 9 His failure is only too evident in the old man's silence.
Shrike, Miss L.'s
cynical editor, comments quite accurately on this situation

when he complains,
albeit with "elaborate" irony, that "nowadays there are so few
people with
whom one can really talk." There are no "heart-to-heart" talks
in this world of
"speakeasies" (and the irony of the word need hardly be
underscored), where
"[e]verybody is so hard-boiled" (21). 10
It is perhaps one of West's achievements in the novella that the
"heart-to-
heart" letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives from his clients (and
which West
adapted from real letters sent to "Susan Chester" of the
Brooklyn Eagle) so
clearly fail to break this silence. While the awkward language
and mis-
spelling of the letters may seem to indicate a certain
individuality (at least
It is interesting that in this scene Miss Lonelyhearts and his
companion assume the identities of the psychologists Havelock
Ellis and Krafft-Ebing, themselves also institutionalized
purveyors of that advice which would have been an organic part
of
the society of the storyteller. Warren Susman reminds us that in
America the institutionalization and acceptance of these
new professional experts in the "talking cure" was also a legacy
of the thirties (201).
10 Amusingly, history seems to bear Shrike out--at least in so
far as the advertising business is concerned. A McCann-
Erickson account executive announced in 1931 that "The day of
the dilettante is gone. The hard-boiled boys who know the
business from the bottom up are now in the front office" (Lears
122-23).

2018 18:57:51 UTC
compared to the callous brevity of the newspaper headlines, or
to Shrike's elo-
quent recitations of cultural cliches), West's description of
them suggests that
they too are mass-produced. The letters are "all of them alike,
stamped from
the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife" (1).
These "heart-
shaped" letters are, one might say, the symbolic stand-in for
the "heart-to-
heart" exchange-just as the "speech balloon" of the comic strip
is the symbolic
stand-in for the conversational voice. We cannot forget,
moreover, that these
confessions are letters written in isolation and confusion to a
newspaper office, a
situation that already signifies the disappearance of that
community of tellers
and interpreters in which advice is possible.
The decay of storytelling is evident also in the case of those
people Miss
Lonelyhearts does meet face to face: the Doyles, the Clean Old
Man, and Mary
Shrike, Miss Lonelyhearts' teasing mistress. The latter is
perhaps the most in-
teresting case in point. She is an avid believer in the "heart-to-

heart," but her
endless stories about her tragic childhood reveal themselves in
West's descrip-
tion as arbitrary signs of the personal. Mary confides, for
instance, that her
"father was a portrait painter, a man of genius," but as Miss
Lonelyhearts
muses, she might equally well have said, "My father was a
Russian prince, my
father was a Piute Indian Chief, my father was an Australian
sheep baron, my
father lost all his money in Wall Street," or (coming full
circle), "my father
was a portrait painter" (23). The passage is particularly
corrosive in suggesting
that even parents, whom one might think of as the guarantors of
an individu-
al's uniqueness and "originality," have also in a sense become
manufactured
goods, standardized options in the "business of dreams." Mary
Shrike is, in
short, a kind of true confession machine, as her consistent
association with
technological imagery seems to emphasize: her dress resembles
"glass-covered
steel," her "pantomime" behaviour strikes Miss Lonelyhearts as
"cleanly me-
chanical" (22). No wonder that Miss Lonelyhearts finds himself
incapable of
offering "a proposition concerning the unfolding of [her] life":
the life of this
Betty Boop-like confession machine is unlikely to do anything
as organic, or
conventionally novelistic, as unfold. It should not surprise us
to read that she
"always talked in headlines" (20).

One final parallel between the two texts remains to be
explored. I have al-
ready suggested that there is, for Benjamin, a correlation
between specific nar-
rative forms and specific modes of production: the story is
associated with arti-
sanal manufacture, and thus retains the uniqueness of
something handmade,
whereas "information" is associated with the massive technical
(re)productive
capacity of a full-blown capitalist order. (The novel and the
technology of
printing occupy something of an intermediate position in this
scheme.) It thus
makes sense that the storyteller and the advice-columnist
should also be ironi-
cally and antithetically connected not only in the way they
relate to people,
but in the way they relate to the inanimate world of things, of
commodities.
Miss Lonelyhearts's hysterical obsession with the jumbled
objects of the modern
city, and his frustration at their trashy irrelevance and mute
facticity, are
(like his assault on the Clean Old Man) the result of a
desperate attempt to re-
store some significant order, some sense of aura to the dead
world. But, whereas
2018 18:57:51 UTC

the storyteller effortlessly stands at the hierarchical apex of
"the world of
created things," the things of Miss Lonelyhearts' world submit
to no such hier-
archy and order (104). At one point in the novel they even
"take the field"
against their would-be redeemer:
When he touched something, it spilled or rolled to the floor.
The collar buttons
disappeared under the bed, the point of the pencil broke, the
handle of the razor
fell off, the window shade refused to stay down. He fought
back, but with too
much violence, and was decisively defeated by the spring of
the alarm clock.
(11)
One of Miss Lonelyhearts' dreams is particularly evocative in
this regard. In it
he imagines himself to be "a magician who [does] tricks with
doorknobs," and
commands them to bleed, flower and speak (9). The dream is
reminiscent of a
passage in The Dream Life of Balso Snell, where the
protagonist, Beagle Darwin,
imagines himself performing a juggling act with "an Ivory
Tower, a Still White
Bird, the Holy Grail, the Nails, the Scourge, the Thorns, and a
piece of the
True Cross" (56). The act symbolically expresses a desire to
reinvest the world
of mass-produced commodities with aura, to turn the most
banal of everyday

objects into relics, mystical objects that bring to the world a
message of redemp-
tion and transformation. But the dream also hints at the failure
of these ef-
forts. The mystical metamorphosis occurs on the stage of a
crowded theater; the
redemption is show biz, a matter of "tricks," a magician's
sleight of hand.
Like Benjamin, then, West is concerned with the social and
material aspects
of narrative and counsel-as his minute, even obsessive interest
in the bric-a-
brac of the urban world would suggest. Miss Lonelyhearts'
"doorknobs," for in-
stance, are not merely imagistic details, nor are they exactly
"objective correla-
tives," expressive of a certain state of the mind. They stand in,
synecdochi-
cally, for all modern things, objects and commodities
manufactured and related
to in a certain way-and a different way from the items of
handicraft that
Benjamin invokes in "The Storyteller" essay. As such they are
signs of the resis-
tant facticity of the contemporary world; and reminders that not
everything-
not all kinds of narrative nor all kinds of redemption-is
possible at any given
moment in history. No matter, then, how intense Miss
Lonelyhearts' desire to
be sincere, and no matter how genuine his personal religious
experience, the sto-
ryteller's world cannot be re-invented (or so his dream tells us),
except by a kind

of social prestidigitation on the level of appearance.
III: Comic strips
Having looked at this kind of spectacular social magic, we have
perhaps al-
ready shifted the terms of analysis to those suggested by our
second paradigm:
the comic strip ad. Let me say immediately that in bringing
these corny narra-
tives to mind, I am not trying to demonstrate any specific
resemblance between
them and the novella. They stand here (as I suggested above) as
a synecdoche
of sorts, as reminders that traditional forms of meaning-
narrative and advice,
2018 18:57:51 UTC
moral authority, aura-were not exactly lost in West's world.
Such forms were
being simulated and recirculated apace. Rather than trace the
"influence" of
any individual ad, I shall therefore try to indicate in general
terms the ideo-
logical and discursive pressure that such utopian stories might
exert on a
"literary" text such as West's.
It is, however, quite reasonable to suppose that the "continuity

series" ads
impinged directly on West's imagination as he was writing
Miss Lonelyhearts,
the work he considered giving the subtitle "a novel in the form
of a comic
strip." He was always an aficionado of popular culture, and
between 1929 and
1933 this interest started to take a more serious, investigative,
even anthropo-
logical turn. Inspired by William Carlos Williams's use of non-
literary docu-
ments in his book In The American Grain, by the reportorial
impulse of much
American writing of the time, and by the experiments of the
Dadaists and
Surrealists, West consciously "interested himself in
entertainments in which
the masses were interested, and now reassessed movies,
cartoons, popular liter-
ature, and jazz as expressions of collective yearning" (Martin,
165). His friend,
Julian Shapiro, recalls specifically how he and West amused
each other by
reading the advertisements from magazines aloud to each other
(Martin, 141),
and one can easily imagine them delighting in those speech-
balloon dialogues,
crafted by the copy writers for Post Bran Flakes, Life Buoy,
and Listerine.
We might also note that, while West eventually gave up his
idea of treat-
ing his chapters like the conventional frames of the comic strip,
and of putting
the dialogue in speech balloons, many of his critics have
detected traces of the

original idea in the final product. Cited in evidence are the
novel's episodic
structure, its rapid tempo, its caricature-like descriptions, its
comically exces-
sive violence, its "primary colored locations," and so forth. 11
It seems to me,
however, that the novella's response to the popular culture of
the day becomes
even more striking once we relate it not just to the comic strips
(Krazy Kat, Dick
Tracy, etc.), but specifically to the comic strip advertisements
of the day: to that
brand-new narrative form in which the easy solutions of the
therapeutic com-
modity are combined with the pseudo-personal solace of the
advice letter.
Thematically and ideologically Miss Lonelyhearts is quite
clearly marked by
the shadow presence of such advertisements' narratives of
quotidian salvation.
The central problem in the text (for both the protagonist and
the novelist) is
surely the struggle to represent a world that has already, again
and again, been
represented and encoded by these familiar comedies of what
Michael Schudson
has called "Capitalist Realism" (214-18).
To make this claim with regard to Miss Lonelyhearts, a text
saturated with
the language of commercial hype, descriptions of advertising
posters, parodic
slogans, and so forth, is hardly a radical move. It is, after all,
possible to argue
that the "sudden profusion" of advertisements in the mid-1920s
and the ideo-

logical pressure exerted by their collective social narrative
"reshaped the re-
ception of narrativity as a whole."'2 By this argument all
fictions of the time,
11 See for instance Martin, 197; Reid, 84-91; Zlotnick, 236-40;
Strychacz, 165-66; Raban, 221.
12 Wicke, 120. Fredric Jameson also argues that the form and
cultural meaning of modernist texts can be grasped fully only
when they are seem in relation-indeed, in reaction--to mass
culture, their dialectical counter. Modernism and mass
2018 18:57:51 UTC
even those that do not explicitly thematize the struggle, are in
some sense in
competition with the infinitely reproduceable narratives of
advertisement and
their minor, but readily-delivered epiphanies. Miss
Lonelyhearts is simply
more self-conscious and self-reflexive in its examination of
these new conditions
of reception.
We might recall, to begin with, that Miss Lonelyhearts' advice
column is
from its very inception an advertisement, a "circulation stunt"
for the newspa-

per; it is significant also that the only alternative employment
which suggests
itself to Miss L. is a job with an advertising agency. The
enterprise, in other
words, is made to seem almost inescapable, and seems to frame
all possible ac-
tivities. 3 Moreover, Miss Lonelyhearts' task is, one might say,
to write ad-
vertising copy for life itself: to translate the letters of his
clients into tales of
satisfied customers, redeemed, not from the mere
embarassments of B.O., but
from ennui, despair, poverty and terror.'4 Like all of society's
proliferating
purveyors of therapy (such as "Philadelphia Jack O'Brien" the
body-building
guru, who puts in a brief appearance in one of Shrike's
speeches), Miss
Lonelyhearts must offer his customers the promise of
transformation, or at the
very least a "spiritual liniment" (53), an "aspirin," (13), or a
slogan (52). His
column thus deals out a kind of pseudo-spiritual feel-good
poetry (e.g. "Life is
worth while, for it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and
ecstasy and faith
that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar" [1]).
The potentially
commercial character of such lines-we could surely trademark
these as
"Walter Pater Lite"-is highlighted in Shrike's constant parodies
of such
remedies. The editor, for instance, advocates the delights of
Bach, Beethoven,
and Brahms with the line "Smoke a 3 B pipe"; he recommends
"Christ Dentist"

as being rather like Listerine, a "Preventer of Decay." In the
context of his
monologues even the biblical question "When the salt has lost
its savour, who
shall savour it again?" (35), comes to resemble a household
hint, a letter to
Mary Hale Martin, or Aunt Ellen, or Betty Crocker.
Miss Lonelyhearts recognizes all too clearly that he is not in a
position to
laugh at "advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning,
engineering, to
add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust," nor at the
dreams of those
who wanted to "wear leather puttees, wanted to develop a grip
that would im-
press the boss, wanted to cushion Raoul's head on their swollen
breasts" (22).
Indeed, towards the end of the novel when Miss Lonelyhearts
pretends to offer
culture are, as he puts it, "twin and inseparable forms of the
fission of artistic production under late captalism"
(CReification," 133-35).
13 A comparable sense of the pervasiveness of advertising is
evident in the work of social critics of the time. I am thinking,
for
instance, of James Rorty, who in 1934 used the term
"advertising business" to mean the "total apparatus of
newspaper and
magazine publishing in America, plus radio broadcasting, and
with important qualifications, the movies" (his list
continues); he also speaks of "the progressive seizure and use
by business, of the apparatus of social communication in
America" (ix).

14 It is instructive to compare the language of some of the
advertisements of the time to that of Miss Lonelyhearts' sad
letters.
Copywriters inserted the solutions offered by their products
into emotional situations only slightly less violent and
embarrassing than those described in the novel. Take, for
instance, the following sample from the Saturday Evening Post
of
October, 1935:
"No Dickie boy ... Mommy hasn't got an ear-ache ... she's just
trying to shut out Daddy's grumblings! And don't cry ...
you'll get another little wagon ... Daddy didn't mean to kick so
viciously." Poor Dicky-and poor mother ... There is a
solution-if father will only listen: switch to the Valet Autostrop
Razor. (104)
2018 18:57:51 UTC
himself as the solution to all of his fianc&e Betty's problems,
he is described in
words that, to my ear, have the unmistakable tone of
advertising copy. He pre-
sents himself as something that would go "with strawberry
sodas and farms in
Connecticut": a new brand of aftershave, one is tempted to
suggest on the
strength of West's adjectives, "simple and sweet, whimsical and
poetic, a trifle
collegiate, yet very masculine" (56).

Miss Lonelyhearts, then, exposes and parodies the discourse
and promises of
narratives like the comic strip ad. Moreover, the constant
association of the
good news of these commercial messages with the good news
of the gospel, sug-
gests that West saw this kind of discourse as falsely auratic:
"the material re-
construction of the religious illusion," to steal a phrase from
Guy Debord (20).
The authority of religion and the authority of the mass media
are shown in the
novella to be inextricably confounded. Even in his quest for the
"sincere an-
swer," Miss Lonelyhearts can think of his success as a
redeemer only in terms of
a kind of transcendental mass culture; he would submit drafts
of his column to
God and God, like an editor on high, would approve them,
would bestow a nu-
minous authority upon his advice (57). One of Shrike's
comments casts his reli-
gious impulse in a particularly sinister light (and one suspects
that his view
here bears authorial sanction). He implicitly associates Miss
Lonelyhearts'
efforts to reinstate a mystical order with Fascism-a political
order which
Benjamin, for one, regarded as a particularly toxic reinvention
of the auratic.
Miss Lonelyhearts, Shrike observes, is the "swollen Mussolini
of the soul" (52).
From this point of view, his attempt to, as it were, make the
cultural trains run
on time-to take on the role of a kind of sprititual Superman, or

a press-agent
for God-is arrogant and archaic.
IV: Novels
If religion, then, seems archaic and mendaciously auratic, the
same can be said
of the utopian dreams-the beauty and truth--of traditional art.
Shrike's cyn-
ical monologues drive home the idea that art's noble promesse
de bonheur is no
less illusory than the commercial panacea of advertising. Even
in the very first
chapter he sloganizes effortlessly for Miss Lonelyhearts'
column: "Art is a Way
Out"; "Art is distilled from suffering"; "Art is One of Life's
Richest Offerings" (4).
Art, or so he proclaims, brings relief to sufferers from dental
problems, acne, and
hunger:
Art! Be an artist or a writer. When you are cold, warm yourself
before the
flaming tints of Titian, when you are hungry, nourish yourself
with great
spiritual foods by listening to the noble periods of Bach, the
harmonies of
Brahms and the thunder of Beethoven.... For you l'art vivant,
the living art,
as you call it. Tell them that you know that your shoes are
broken and that there
are pimples on your face, yes, and that you have buck teeth and
a club foot, but
that you don't care, for tomorrow they are playing Beethoven's
last quartets in
Carnegie Hall and at home you have Shakespeare's plays in one

volume. (34-
35)
2018 18:57:51 UTC
And while Shrike does not mention any novels in his list, it is
clear that his
charges also apply to this artistic form-the one that most
pertinently concerns
West, and that also stands at the center of "The Storyteller"
(which Benjamin
regarded as his counterpart to Lukacs's Theory of the Novel).
15 From a certain
perspective, the novel can even be seen as the form most
vulnerable to the
charge of simulated redemption. It is not just the case that as a
physical object
the novel remains sealed, amidst the headlines, billboards, and
movies, in
what Benjamin once called the "archaic stillness of the book"
(Reflections, 78).
The inner form of its narrative (at least according to the
Lukicsian conception
put forward in "The Storyteller") consciously aspires to a sense
of unity and sig-
nificance: the novel assumes the responsibility to re-invent a
substitute totality
in the modern world (Lukics, 128). Its focus on the problem of

"the meaning of
life," places upon the novel the increasingly difficult task of
delivering an in-
effable meaning from the recalcitrant and fragmentary
materials of isolated
lives, an effect which it achieves, most often, through the
agency of memory.
And while this totalizing effort is for LukAcs both progressive
and positive,
the novel's heroic efforts at meaning and unity can be-and have
been--cast as
an ideological contrivance that simulates a coherence lacking
in the social
world.
Both Benjamin and West emphasize the latter view. Their work
implies
that the substitute totality of the novel is no longer tenable-no
longer, as
Shrike might have put it, "a Way Out." Benjamin's comments
on the ideologi-
cal alibi represented by the novelistic "character" are precisely
to the point:
"By integrating the social process with the development of a
person, it bestows
the most frangible justification on the order determining it. The
legitimacy it
provides stands in direct opposition to reality. Particularly in
the
Bildungsroman, it is this inadequacy that is actualized" (88).
West has even
less patience with the notion of Bildung; it is subjected to a
scornful parody in
Shrike's deliberately corny (and wholly false) narrative about
Miss
Lonelyhearts' rise through the "University of Hard Knocks":

And then, the man, the man Miss Lonelyhearts-struggling
valiantly to real-
ize a high ideal, his course shaped by a proud aim. But alas!
cold and scornful,
the world heaps obstacle after obstacle in his path; deems he
the goal at hand, a
voice of thunder bids him 'Halt!' 'Let each hindrance be thy
ladder,' thinks he.
'Higher, even higher, mount!' And so he climbs ... (54)
Both West and Benjamin, moreover, implicitly place an
embargo on a certain
kind of interpretation of the novel, in which the heroic reader,
one might say,
abets the heroic novelist in his efforts. This is precisely the
kind of reading one
discovers in the work of West critics who insist that the
novelist "succeeds"
15 Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem that he had conceived
of "a new 'theory of the novel,' sure to gain you, strong
approval
and a place next to Luk&cs" (Witte, 19).
2018 18:57:51 UTC
even while Miss Lonelyhearts fails. 16 Each text, by a curious
and intriguing co-
incidence, offers a description of someone reading a novel-a

description which,
I would argue, serves as a kind of cautionary image for future
readers and critics
and therefore merits our close attention.
Section xv of "The Storyteller" draws a picture of an avid
reader, whose
"burning interest," fanned by the effect of suspense, feeds on
the novel as a fire
feeds on "logs in the fireplace" (100). It is not an
unsympathetic picture. But the
metaphor by which Benjamin expresses the novel's power of
fascination-"a
dry material" for the readerly flame-is double-edged. It damns
the novel as
no longer vital. The scene is in fact rather a desolate one. In
contrast to the
scene in which someone listens to a story in the company of the
storyteller
(perhaps weaving or spinning with other spinners and weavers
as he listens),
the reader of the novel is alone. He also seems cold as he
devours his book, try-
ing to warm his "shivering life" by the inevitably self-
consuming flame of his
reading. The futility of this readerly pleasure recalls the
passion of the suffer-
ing art-lover in Shrike's cynical caricature, who tries to warm
himself before
the illusory "flaming tints of Titian." Benjamin's description
even gives the act
of reading a certain anti-social ghoulishness. The "meaning of
life," he argues,
emerges only at that moment of death; for it is only from the
retrospective per-
spective of the finis-whether this means the death of a

character or the end of
a narrative-that the total significance of fictional life can be
seen at all.
What the reader of the novel seeks, therefore, is to draw from
the death of an-
other "the warmth which we never draw from our own fate"
(111). The novel,
the product of the solitary bourgeois subject, appears, in this
description, to
produce further fragmentation; it only increases the lonely
individuality that
made it difficult to share experience in the first place.
It is with this idea that the essay's discussion of the novel
comes to a rather
abrupt end, and Benjamin turns exclusively to his meditations
on the decaying
craft of the story. This shift in direction is critically
significant. It suggests
that the novel-the novel as substitute totality, that is-has
become an aes-
thetic and political dead-end. It is even perhaps a kind of
danger. Benjamin, as
Jiirgen Habermas once observed, held the strangely mystical
and pessimistic
view that "the semantic potential on which human beings draw
in order to in-
vest the world with meaning and make it accessible to
experience" is not infi-
nite; this potential, deposited in the earliest cultural forms
"cannot be ex-
panded but only transformed" (110). It would therefore seem
particularly trou-
bling that the "meaning of life," so heroically synthesized by
the novelist's

16 One readily discovers examples of this kind of reading in
Harold Bloom's recent collection of critical essays on West.
After
an appropriately negative assessment of the "disorder of
language" in the modern world, Jeffrey Duncan, for instance,
announces with surprising confidence that West was "as an
artist, a practising idealist":
Miss Lonelyhearts looks at a gray sky and, empiricist that he
is, sees only a dirty tabula rasa. Against that he sees the most
referential and hence ephemeral of all literature, a espapr,
failing (naturally) to soar. But West's uards liP nicely, bearing
Jbr the space of our imagination all the significance Miss
Lonelyhearts misses in his, not in the form of crosses and
doues, to be
sure, but in the form of figures, of ideas, of axrds touched with
life and touching us with the same' (99).
This kind of redemptive move minimizes West's discomfiting
profundity as a cultural critic in the very same gesture that
celebrates him as an artist. It also demonstrates the residual
power of the Lukicsian theory of the novel. Lukics's cultural
hero is always the novelist whose creation "stands as that
momentary reconciliation of matter and spirit toward which his
hero strives in vain" (Jameson, Marxism,173).
2018 18:57:51 UTC
RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYELLING 57

backward glance, is "jealously" seized upon and recklessly
"swallow[ed]" by
the solitary reader-who cannot relay this experience to others.
17 Benjamin's
critical efforts in this essay and elsewhere therefore tend to
privilege marginal
and non-affirmative forms: forms in which the "semantic
potential" is not
given in such a readily consumable package as the novel, or
forms where mean-
ing is in even greater danger of being lost forever. These might
be literary (as in
the case of the Baroque allegorists and the Surrealists) or mass-
produced (as in
the case of the fascinating detritus of the early forms of
commercial culture--
dioramas, fashions, expositions, advertisements-studied in the
Arcades
Project). The story is also such a form. Rendered obsolescent
by the forces of
modernity, and marginalized to the very point of extinction, it
yields not a re-
membered and synthesized meaning, but one that is virtually
forgotten-
though once experienced from day to day. Benjamin tries to
preserve, in the
fragmentary meditations of his essay, the memory-trace of an
earlier unity
still legible in this dying form. He therefore places at the end
of the essay a
counter-image to the novel's destructive and scarcely warming
fire: "the gentle
flame" of the story, which (like the earlier metaphor of the still
germinative
seeds from the ancient pyramids [90]) suggests a more
productive albeit parsi-

monious illumination. In this sense, Benjamin's "conservative
revolutionary"
criticism can be regarded as redemptive-not as destructive, but
as transforma-
tive, of the promises of high or mass culture (Habermas, 117,
124).
The "scene of reading" in Miss Lonelyhearts is ostensibly
happier than the
one from "The Storyteller." It is placed, perhaps strategically,
quite early in
the text. In his austere room, Miss Lonelyhearts pores over The
Brothers
Karamazov, specifically the passage where Father Zossima
preaches the ne-
cessity of learning "to perceive the divine mystery in things"
and of learning
"to love the whole world with an all-embracing love" (8). Miss
Lonelyhearts
reads with appreciation. But West slyly suggests that this act of
reading is lit-
tle different from someone reading a sob-column, or a comic-
strip ad. Miss
Lonelyhearts finds Father Zossima's words to be "excellent
advice," and be-
lieves quite readily that if he followed them, the "Kingdom of
Heaven would
arrive," and "his column would be syndicated" (8). The utopian
promises of lit-
erature, religion, and mass culture are again sinisterly
intertwined, and Miss
Lonelyhearts' rather cheap and self-serving idealism makes us
all the more
suspicious of false solutions as "spiritual liniments" (53) which
can all too eas-
ily become a "damned aspirin" (13). Shortly afterwards, when

one of his nas-
17 Habermas's observation emerges from a discussion of
Benjamin's ambivalence about aura, which I will not attempt to
rehearse here. I might, however, try to suggest another way in
which the novel, with its reliance on memory and its
retrospective interpretation of the total "meaning of life,"
might strike Benjamin as a kind of aesthetic and political dead-
end (this despite his great admiration for Proust and Kafka).
His work on Proust, in fact, offers us two useful analytical
terms: the "mwmoire volontaire" and the "mrmoire
involuntaire" (derived from Bergson but also, or so Fredric
Jameson
suggests, from Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle). For
Freud the unconscious "memory trace," however strange and
fragmentary, is privileged over the willful reconstruction of
conscious recollection, and is far more suggestive to the
analyst--far closer to the hidden "truth." Indeed, the conscious
memory can be dangerous since it tends to displace the
memory trace. Similarly, for Benjamin, the story with its
"short-lived reminiscences" is far more productive of a true,
though
fragmentary, illumination than is the "perpetuating
remembrance of the novelist" (98). And the novel, as "The
Storyteller"
clearly suggests, tends to displace the story--it is one of the
first symptoms of the story's decline. See Jameson, Marxism,
63-64, and Buck-Morss, Dialectics, 38-39 for further
discussion.
2018 18:57:51 UTC

tier colleagues salutes Miss Lonelyhearts with a mocking "How
now
Dostoievski?" his hopes for cultural salvation, or even a useful
lesson, seem
idle indeed (25).
This scene of reading, in short, forbids by parody any kind of
redemptive
reading or writing. Significantly, however, West does not
exactly abandon the
novel form but uses it in a way that the literary history of the
"Storyteller" es-
say does not foresee: as a medium for challenging and
exploding the affirma-
tive novel from within. Miss Lonelyhearts seems to insist that
as long as the
world remains unchanged, all cultural promises will be the
merest hype, and
the difference between novels and mass culture will be
irrelevant. In other
words, if a solution is to be found (and West makes no claim
that it will), it will
not be found in culture, but in a transformed way of life. I say
this cautiously,
since the extreme negativity of Miss Lonelyhearts does not
exactly sanction this
final and desperate hope. But it is significant that in a poem
from the same
year, "Burn the Cities" (1933), West presents an image we
might juxtapose to
the storyteller's "gentle flame," an image of the utterly
destructive flames of
social revolution:

Burn the cities
Burn Paris
City of light
Twice-burned city
Warehouse of the arts
The spread hand is a star
The fist a torch
Workers of the World
Unite
Burn Paris
(Martin, 329-30)
In the rubble of the great cities of culture, West places,
startlingly, the figure of
Marx, who "performs" the trick Miss Lonelyhearts could never
pull off: "the
miracle of loaves and fishes," of giving the masses not the
"stones" of his ad-
vice column but real bread.
The project suggested by West's "novel in the form of a comic
strip" can now
be grasped more clearly. There is a temptation to read this
intriguing phrase as
a call for a reinvention of the novel, for the divising of a new
kind of het-
eroglossic text, in which the discursive boundaries between
high and mass cul-
ture have been erased. (I am thinking here of the kind of
argument that has
been made with regard to Ulysses, for instance, which as one
critic puts it

"performs a tango with advertising, and is set to its music"
[Wicke, 123]). But
Miss Lonelyhearts seems, rather, to call for something more
desperate and anti-
aesthetic: an abolition of affirmative culture, a refusal to create
yet another
false utopia. West is drawn, or so the bitter parodies of Miss
Lonelyhearts sug-
gest, towards a kind of demystifying and subversive practice--
much like that
2018 18:57:51 UTC
RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYErLING 59
which came to be advocated, some thirty years later, by the
Situationist
International:
To make art would be to betray the common, buried wishes art
once spoke for,
but to practice d6tournement-to write new speech balloons for
newspaper
ncomic-strips, or for that matter old masters, to insist
simultaneously on a
"devaluation" of art and its "reinvestment" in a new kind of
social speech, a
"communication" containing its own criticism, a technique that
could not
mystify because its very form was a demystification. (Marcus,
170)

It is telling that West's next work, A Cool Million, comes even
closer than Miss
Lonelyhearts to this kind of subversive and irreverent
citationality. Its lan-
guage is devoid not only of any sign of high literary or
personal style but also
fatuous in its reiteration of optimistic cliches.
To return finally to Benjamin's argument, if the novel
problematizes the
meaning of life, then West's "novel in the form of a comic
strip" problematizes
the meaning of the novel-by making that search for meaning
too explicit and
therefore parodic and vacuous. In this sense, Miss Lonelyhearts
is indeed "a
communication containing its own criticism"; it writes new
speech balloons, as it
were, for an old strip. It confronts the self-destructive
possibility that outdated
artistic pieties have become inadequate-just as inadequate as
the good country
life advocated by Miss Lonelyhearts' sentimental fiancee, the
pleasures of the
3B pipe, and the magic of Lux.
Works Cited
Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday and Since Yesterday:
A Popular History of the 20s
and 30s. New York: Bonanza, 1986.
Angus, Ian H. "Circumscribing Post-Modern Culture." Cultural
Politics in Contemporary
America. Eds. Ian Angus and Sut Jhally. New York: Routledge,
1989. 96-110.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass
Culture as Social Decay. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell U P, 1983.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections.
Trans. Harry Zorn. New York:
Schocken, 1985.
. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings.
Trans. Edmund
Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1986.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics:
Theodor W. Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. Hassocks, Sussex:
Harvester P, 1977.
. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project. Cambridge:
M.I.T. P. 1989.
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Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and
Red, 1977.
Duncan, Jeffrey L. "The Problem of Language in Miss
Lonelyhearts." Nathanael West's
Miss Lonelyhearts. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea

House, 1987. 145-56.
Habermas, Jiirgen. "Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising
or Rescuing Critique." On
Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections. Ed. Gary
Smith Cambridge: M.I.T. P,
1988. 90-128.
Herzog, Herta. "On Borrowed Experience: An Analysis of
Listening to Daytime Sketches."
Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 65-91.
Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century
Dialectical Theories of Literature.
Princeton: Princeton U P, 1971.
. "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture." Social Text 1
(1979): 130-48.
Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds. New York: Reynal and
Hitchcock, 1942.
Kelley, Robin D.G. "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Folk.'
American Historical Review 97
(1992): 1400-08.
Lears, T.J. Jackson. "Packaging the Folk: Tradition and
Amnesia in American Advertising
1880-1940." Folk Roots, New Roots: Folklore in American
Life. Eds. Jane S. Becker and
Barbara Franco. Lexington, MA: Museum of Our National
Heritage, 1988. 103-40.
Levine, Lawrence W. "The Folklore of Industrial Society:
Popular Culture and its
Audiences." American Historical Review 97(1992): 1369-99.

Luccock, Halford E. American Mirror: Social Ethical and
Religious Aspects of American
Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1941.
Luki~cs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-
Philosophical Essay on the Forms of
Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: M.I.T.
P, 1971.
Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making
Way for Modernity, 1920-
1940. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the
Twentieth Century. Cambridge,
Harvard U P, 1989.
Martin, Jay. Nathanael West: The Art of his Life. New York:
Caroll and Graf, 1970.
. ed. Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey: Prentiss-Hall, 1971.
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RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYTELING 61
Raban, Jonathan. "A Surfeit of Commodities: The Novels of
Nathanael West." The
American Novel and the Nineteen Twenties. Eds. Malcolm

Bradbury and David Palmer.
London: Edward Arnold, 1971. 215-31.
Reid, Randall. The Fiction of Nathanael West: No Redeemer,
No Promised Land. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1971.
Rorty, James. Our Master's Voice: Advertising. New York:
John Day, 1934.
Schudson, Michael. Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its
Dubious Impact on American
Society. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
Strychacz, Thomas. "Challenging Mass Culture: American
Writers and Literary Authority,
1880-1940." Diss. Princeton U, 1986.
Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of
American Society in the
Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
West, Nathanael. Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the
Locust. New York: New Directions,
1969.
. The Dream Life of Balso Snell and A Cool Million. New
York: Farrar, Strauss,
and Giroux, 1985.
. "Some Notes on Miss L." 1933. Rpt. in Martin, ed. 66-67.
. "Some Notes on Violence." 1933. Rpt. in Martin, ed. 50-51.
Wicke, Jennifer. Advertising Fictions: Literature,
Advertisement, and Social Reading. New

York: Columbia U P, 1988.
Witte, Bernd. "Benjamin and LukAcs: Historical Notes on
Their Relationship." New
German Critique 5 (Spring 1975): 3-26.
Zlotnick, Joan. "The Medium is the Message, Or is It?: A Study
of Nathanael West's Comic
Strip Novel." Journal of Popular Culture 5 (1971): 236-40.
2018 18:57:51 UTC
Contentsp. [40]p. 41p. 42p. 43p. 44p. 45p. 46p. 47p. 48p. 49p.
50p. 51p. 52p. 53p. 54p. 55p. 56p. 57p. 58p. 59p. 60p. 61Issue
Table of ContentsNovel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1
(Autumn, 1993) pp. 1-119Front Matter [pp. 1-114]A Novel
Sympathy: The Imagination of Community in George Eliot [pp.
5-23]Hardy's Noble Melancholics [pp. 24-39]The Storyteller,
the Novelist, and the Advice Columnist: Narrative and Mass
Culture in "Miss Lonelyhearts" [pp. 40-61]Culture as Colloquy:
Flann O'Brien's Postmodern Dialogue with Irish Tradition [pp.
62-84]"A Parody of Martyrdom": The Rosenbergs, Cold War
Theology, and Robert Coover's "The Public Burning" [pp. 85-
101]Review EssayWhat Does Kincaid Want? [pp. 103-
113]ReviewsSobering Sororophobia [pp. 115-117]Transmitting
the Doctoral Narrative [pp. 118-119]Back Matter
Taylor Brodsky
Professor Fahy
English 85
10 December 2018
Barnard, Rita. “The Storyteller, the Novelist, and the Advice
Columnist: Narrative and Mass Culture in ‘Miss
Lonelyhearts.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 27, no. 1,
1993, pp. 40-61.

In the article, “The Storyteller, the Novelest and the Advice
Columnist: Narrative and Mass Culture in Miss Lonelyhearts,”
Rita Barnard presents a critique of both Miss Lonelyhearts and
Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller: Reflections of
the Work of Nioklai Leskov,” that has yet to be established by
any literary critics thus far. She finds that the two are strikingly
similar,
A note about the References tool in Word
On a PC/Windows system (based on Office 2010)
When you need to create a citation (giving credit for work that
you are referencing), you
click on References, then on Insert Citation. The next step is to
add a new source.
When you get to the "Create Source" window, it is suggested
that you click on the
"Show All Bibliography Fields." Here is a sample Source
screen.
Once you have entered all the source information, click on
Bibliography and then Insert
Bibliography.
This is the citation:
(Joseph, 2000)
This is how the source is entered into the References list:
Joseph, J. (2000, October). Ethics in the Workplace. Retrieved

August 3, 2015, from asae-The
Center for Association Leadership:
http://www.asaecenter.org/Resources/articledetail.cfm?ItemNum
ber=13073
Other fields on the source page would be used for a journal
article or an article from a
periodical.
On a Mac/OS system (based on Office 2013)
From the MAC Help files:
To add a citation, a works cited list, or a bibliography to your
document, you first
add a list of the sources that you used.
Add a source by using the Source Manager
The Source Manager lists every source ever entered on your
computer so that
you can reuse them in any other document. This is useful, for
example, if you
write research papers that use many of the same sources. If you
open a
document that includes citations, the sources for those citations
appear under
Current list. All the sources that you have cited, either in
previous documents or
in the current document, appear under Master list.

1. Open up your Word document.
2. On the Document Elements tab , under References ,
click Manage.
3. At the bottom of the Citations tool, click , and then click
Citation Source Manager .
1 2
3
4
1 2
3
4
4. Click New.
5. On the Type of Source pop-up menu, select a source type.
6. Complete as many of the fields as you want. The required
fields are

marked with an asterisk (*). These fields provide the minimum
information
that you must have for a citation.
7.
Note You can insert citations even when you do not have all
the publishing details.
If publishing details are omitted, citations are inserted as
numbered placeholders.
Then you can edit the sources later. You must enter all the
required information for a
source before you can create a bibliography.
8. When you are finished, click OK.The source information that
you entered
appears in the Current list and Master list of the Source
Manager.
9. To add additional sources, repeat steps 3 through 6.
10. Click Close.The source information that you entered appears
in the
Citations List in the Citations tool.
Edit a source in the Citations tool
You can edit a source directly in the document or in the
Citations tool. When you
change the source, the changes apply to all instances of that
citation throughout
the document. However, if you make a manual change to a
particular citation
within the document, those changes apply only to that particular
citation. Also,
that particular citation is not updated or overridden when you
update the citations

and bibliography.
1. On the Document Elements tab, under References, click
Manage.
2. In the Citations List, select the citation that you want to edit.
3. At the bottom of the Citations tool, click , and then click Edit
Source.
4. Make the changes that you want, and then click OK. If you
see a message
that asks whether you want to save changes in both the Master
list and the
Current list, click No to change only the current document, or
click Yes to
apply changes to the source of the citation and use it in other
documents.
Remove a source from the Citations List
Before you can remove a source from the Citations List, you
must delete all
related citations.
1. In the document, delete all the citations associated with the
source that
you want to remove.
2. Tip You can use the search field to locate citations. In the
search field , enter part of the citation.

Manage.
4. At the bottom of the Citations tool, click , and then click
Citation Source
Manager.
5. In the Current list, select the source that you want to remove,
and then
click Delete. The source now appears only in the Master list.
6.
Note If the Delete button is unavailable, or if you see a check
mark next to the source in the list, there is still at least one
related citation in the document. Delete all remaining related
citations in the document, and then try deleting
the source again.
7. Click Close. The source that you removed no longer
appears in the Citations
List.
Step 2. Insert, edit, or delete a citation (optional)
Insert a citation
1. In your document, click where you want to insert the citation.
Manage.
3. In the Citations List, double-click the source that you want to
cite. The

citation appears in the document.
Add page numbers or suppress author, year, or title for a
specific citation
Use this option to make custom changes to a citation and keep
the ability to
update the citation automatically.
Note The changes that you make by using this method apply
only to this citation.
1. Click anywhere between the parentheses of the citation. A
frame appears
around the citation.
2. Click the arrow on the frame, and then click Edit this
Citation.
3. Add page numbers, or select the Author, Year, or Title check
box to keep that
information from showing in the citation.
Make manual changes to a specific citation
If you want to change a specific citation manually, you can
make the citation text
static and edit the citation in any way that you want. After you
make the text

static, the citation will no longer update automatically. If you
want to make
changes later, you must make the changes manually.
1. Click anywhere between the parentheses of the citation. A
frame appears
around the citation.
2. Click the arrow on the frame, and then click Convert Citation
to Static Text.
3. In the document, make the changes to the citation.
Delete a single citation from the document
1. In the document, find the citation that you want to delete.
2.
Tip You can use the search field to locate citations. In the
search field , enter part of the citation.
3. Select the whole citation, including the parentheses, and then
press DELETE.
Step 3. Insert or edit a works cited list or a bibliography
A works cited list is a list of all works you referred to (or
"cited") in your
document, and is typically used when you cite sources using the
MLA style. A
works cited list differs from a bibliography, which is a list of
all works that you

consulted when your researched and wrote your document.
Insert a works cited list or a bibliography
1. In your document, click where you want the works cited list
or bibliography to
appear (usually at the very end of the document, following a
page break).
Bibliography, and
then click Bibliography or Works Cited.
Change a works cited list or a bibliography style
You can change the style of all the citations contained in a
document's works
cited list or bibliography without manually editing the style of
the citations
themselves. For example, you can change the citations from the
APA style to the
MLA style.
1. On the View menu, click Draft or Print Layout.
2. On the Document Elements tab, under References, click the
Bibliography
Style pop-up menu, and then click the style that you want to
change the
bibliography's references to. All
references in your document's bibliography change to the new
style.
Update a works cited list or a bibliography

If you add new sources to the document after you inserted the
works cited list or
bibliography, you can update the works cited list or
bibliography to include the
new sources.
1. Click the works cited list or bibliography. A frame appears
around it.
2. Click the arrow on the frame, and then click Update Citations
and
Bibliography.
Research Paper Using Word
This assignment has two goals: 1) have students increase their
understanding of
ethical issues related to the use of information technology
through research, and 2)
learn to correctly use the tools and techniques within Word to
format a research paper,
including use of available References and citation tools. These
skills will be valuable
throughout a student’s academic career. The paper will require
a title page, NO
abstract, three to five full pages of content with incorporation
of a minimum of 3 external

resources from credible sources and a Works Cited/References
page. Wikipedia and
similar general information sites, blogs or discussion groups are
not considered
creditable sources for a research project. No more than 10% of
the paper may be in the
form of a direct citation from an external source.
A list of topics from which students can choose is provided
below.
Topics for Research Paper
The focus of the paper should be on the following:
1. how information technology supports or makes possible
biometrics and its
various implementations, and potential ethical and privacy
issues related to the
use of biometrics.
2. how information technology supports or makes possible the
development of
artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent agents (such as Siri,
Cortana, etc.) and
potential ethical and privacy issues related to AI.
3. how information technology supports or makes possible the
development of
robots as intelligent as humans, smart machines and the IoT,
What potential
benefits and risks can/will robots introduce?
4. how information technology supports or makes possible
genome-based
treatments for curing diseases, and potential ethical and privacy

issues that
might result from use of such treatments.
5. how information technology impacts family, eldercare, and
parenting issues, and
potential ethical and privacy issues introduced by the use of
information
technology and information systems in this area
6. how information technology has enhanced the use of
computer-assisted
education in the elementary school classroom, and the possible
positive and
negative impacts this enhancement provides.
7. issues facing the IT Manager or Security professional (e.g.,
privacy, ownership,
control, accuracy, and security) in an environment where
information technology
is constantly expanding and changing.
8. how information technology plays a role in the era of Edward
Snowden, Chelsea
Manning, WikiLeaks, et and the impact on defense information
systems
9. how information technology plays a role in the rise (and fall)
of cryptocurrency
and the positive and negatives of switching to the bitcoin
environment.
If there is another topic that addresses ethical issues as related

to information
technology that is of special interest to you but one that is not
in the list above, request
permission from your instructor before selecting this alternate
topic.
Writing Quality for the Research Paper
* All Grammar, Verb Tenses, Pronouns, Spelling, Punctuation,
and Writing Competency
should be without error.
* Be particularly careful about mis-matching a noun and
pronoun. For example, if you
say "A person does this…" then do not use "their" or "they"
when referring to that
person. "Person" is singular; "their" or "they" is plural.
* Remember: there is not their, your is not you're, its is not it's,
too is not to or two, site
is not cite, and who should be used after an individual, not that.
For example, "the
person WHO made the speech" not "the person THAT made the
speech."
* In a professional paper one does not use contractions
(doesn't, don't, etc.) and one
does not use the personal I, you or your. Use the impersonal as
in the previous
sentence. It is more business-like to say "In a professional paper
one should not use
contractions," rather than saying, "In a professional paper you
don't use contractions."
*Remember: spell-check, then proofread. Better yet, have a
friend or colleague read it
before submitting it. Read it out loud to yourself. Read it as if

you are submitting it to
your boss.
You can find instructions on how to use the References tool in
Word on a PC or
on a Mac in the separate file attached here.
Complete rubrics for this paper are found in the table on the
next page.
Element # Requirement Points Allocated Comments
01
Open Word and save a blank document with the following
name:
“Student’s First InitialLastName Research Project”
Example: JSmith Research Project
Paper should be
- double-spaced,
- margins are set to 1” (left, right, top bottom),
- 12 point Arial type is used for all text
- headings, if used, are bold but in 12 point Arial type
1.0
This is the font in normal
paragraphs. Heading and title
fonts may be in bold, but
should remain in 12 point font.
02

Body of the paper is at least three full pages and does not
exceed
five typed, double-spaced pages. The 3- 5 pages does not
include
the title and reference pages and these are not included in the
page
count of the body of the paper.
1.0
Charts and other graphical
information are not included in
the page count.
03
Title Page which shows title of the paper and the author's
(student's)
name. The title and author’s name should be centered
horizontally
and vertically on the title page.
0.5
Title must be appropriate for
content
04
At least three (3) APA formatted in-text citations.
If you are not familiar with APA format, it is recommended that
you
use the References feature in Word for your citations and
Reference
List or refer to the "Citing and Writing" option under the
Resources/Library/Get Help area in the LEO classroom.
It is important to review the final format for APA-style

correctness
even if generated by Word.
1.0
These can be anywhere in the
document, but the citations
must be relevant to what is
being referenced and the APA
format is used correctly.
05
At least two (2) informational footnotes.
(Note: APA Style does not use footnotes for citations; however,
APA
style does allow for the incorporation of informational
footnotes)
Footnotes are not used to list a reference! Footnotes contain
information about the topic to which the footnote has been
attached.
1.0
These can be anywhere in the
document, but the
informational footnotes must
be relevant to the associated
text. The purpose of this
requirement is to effectively
incorporate the information
and demonstrate that you can
use the MS Word footnoting
functionality.

06
References Page using APA format for references. The
References
must be on a separate page from the body of the paper. To
ensure
1.0
All works listed must be
incorporated within the writing
Element # Requirement Points Allocated Comments
that the References page is separate from the body of the paper,
use
a hard return (CTRL Enter) after the end of your paper body and
the
start of the References page.
If you are not familiar with APA format, it is recommended that
you
use the References feature in Word for your citations and
Reference
List or refer to the "Citing and Writing" option under the
Resources/Library/Get Help area in the LEO classroom.
It is important to review the final format for APA-style
correctness
even if generated by Word.
REMEMBER: Every source listed on the Reference page must
be
cited at least once in the body of the paper. And every citation
needs

to have a matching source listed on the References page.
of your paper as specified in
APA style
07
Describe the topic and ethical issues as they relate to the use of
Information Technology. How does technology support your
topic?
What are the issues that technology introduces to this specific
topic?
2.0
08
Discuss the trends and ways individuals and/or organizations
are
impacted by the issue or are working to prevent the impact. Is
this a
topic that has been made possible only because of advances in
technology? Or has the topic been part of technology
development
since its beginning? Is the issue you are exploring helpful or
harmful
to individuals? To society in general?
2.0
09
Paper must be well-organized and clearly written in a style
appropriate for college level work. Review the notes at the
beginning
of project description (Writing Quality for the Research Paper)

2.0
10
Paper should be grammatically correct and contain no spelling
errors. Direct quotations should not exceed 10% of total words
used
in the paper.
1.5
Although you should use the
Spell Check and Grammar
Check function in Word, this
will not catch all errors – you
are ultimately responsible for
proofreading.
TOTAL: 13

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