Culture of Complaint : Toward a Genealogy of Cultural Form

Kylie Erfani

Advisor: Denise Albanese, PhD, Department of English

Committee Members: Alison Landsberg, Rachel Jones

Johnson Center, #326B
April 10, 2026, 03:30 PM to 05:30 PM

Abstract:

In the last thirty years, the scholarly and popular discourse on complaint has markedly changed; since the early 1990s a cottage industry of anti-complaining scholarship has proliferated in fields as diverse as popular psychology, marketing, and political journalism. Whereas in the history of philosophy, complaint is conceived as a matter of—usually ethically impermissible—individual behavior, the contemporary scholarship suggests that complaint is a social problem. That is—we, collectively, complain too much. Ours is, as journalist Robert Hughes describes it, a “culture of complaint.” My dissertation queries the meaning of this turn enacted both in popular dialogue and scholarly literature and asks, what is complaint in the context of the American twenty-first century? Moreover, I ask, what economic, political, technological, and aesthetic conditions determine the dominant forms of complaint in the contemporary context?
One of the key innovations of this dissertation is the consideration of complaint as a cultural form, that is, as a shared social script that renders certain communicative acts intelligible as complaint within certain historically, institutionally, and linguistically specific regimes of knowledge. Following cultural theorist Raymond Williams, I contend that “complaint” is not self-same over time, but that the social deployment of the term as a description for certain kinds of gestures or practices shifts in relation to shifting historical material conditions. This cultural materialist perspective challenges the idea that ours is a culture of newly ubiquitous complaining by insisting that any such claim must be evaluated against historically contingent complaint paradigms. To this end, I review three significant moments in Anglophone history where the culturally dominant meaning of complaint is in flux: late medieval/early modern poetic and legal plaint making in the 14th-17th century, the emergence of modern civil procedure in the late 19th-early 20th century, and the contemporary remaking of complaint in the digital era. These moments, explored across four chapters, illuminate how complaint evolves as a cultural form in response to economic, institutional, and technological shifts. By historicizing complaint as a mutable cultural form, this dissertation offers a new framework for understanding how grievance is shaped by—and shapes—social institutions, technologies, and political imaginaries. It contributes to cultural theory, legal history, and digital media studies by revealing how complaint operates not simply as aggrieved expression, but as a contested mode of social legibility.