Claire Grossman is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. Her research focuses on literary and political-economic discourses of race in the postwar United States. She has taught a writing-intensive seminar on protest literature and organized the Racial Capitalism Working Group at Stanford. Her recent writing with Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young appears in American Literary History, The Cambridge Companion to the Essay, and Public Books.
SHC Project
Uncertain Work: Wagelessness and Post-1965 Multiethnic Literary Form
Uncertain Work analyzes suspense as a narrative strategy for linking racial experience to changes in the nature and organization of work in the postindustrial United States. Looking beyond the aesthetics of representation, Grossman examines how writers including Piri Thomas, Gil Scott-Heron, Helena María Viramontes, and Brian Ascalon Roley use structures of suspense to dramatize and compare between the racial orderings of extra-wage, temporary, and informal labor. The study situates these formal dynamics in conversation with the language of policy reports, congressional hearings, and inquiries regarding the economic status of minority populations. Suggesting that a literary analytical practice is valuable for reading these documents, Grossman shows how the rhetoric of postwar policymaking necessitated its own creative approaches, and in some cases direct consultation with minority writers, in order to distort structural realities.
