ng Dreiser's lifetime as currently relevant social criticism, can, some 75 years after the novel's first appearance now be seen less as important for what it says as for how it came to prominence. Or, to put it another way, the manifest text can be interpreted not only as a literary artifact of social, psychological, and emotional import but also as a latent social document of the pulse of progressive American political and social values and advocacy of the period, as well as of the literary/aesthetic milieu in which it was nurtured. If it is accurate to say that the novel is "about" the effect of morally and ethically superficial and bankrupt values on an ordinary individual, it seems equally accurate to say that present-day critical interest in the novel stems from what it seems to say about the values Dreiser brought to the novelistic project. The evidence of recent critical treatment of An American Tragedy is that the context for the novel is equally as important to contemporary readers as the content of it. Indeed, the literary context for the ideas in the work seems either to explain or marginalize the narrative or even its aesthetic content. Geyh makes this point indirectly, while citing a rather different point directly about An American Tragedy, namely, that "Dreiser's reworking of mass culture texts (chiefly newspaper accounts of similar murders and trials) in An American Tragedy created a crisis of professional authority" (Geyh 552) that drove Dreiser's accusation against Paramount Studios for reworking the novel in its movie version. In a review of Strychacz's examination of postmodern scholarly literary criticism Geyh follows Strychacz in observing that a text's "difference," or critical originality and worthiness, from an academic point of view persistently pursues a course of commentary that "effectively contains and neutralizes the source material so that the high/low [i.e., academic/popular] culture divide can still be ...