Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 44, No. 1  •  Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University  •  DOI 10.2979/jmodelite.44.1.09 Raymond Carver and the Modern Career Imaginary Jesse Zuba Delaware State University Almost without exception, critics endorse the idea that Raymond Carver’s Cathedral marks a turn toward afrmation in the context of his career. Tat the stories themselves strongly suggest otherwise shows the degree to which Carver studies is enthralled by a redemptive career story propagated in part by Carver himself. Tat narrative and its popularity derive from the poverty of the career imag- inary, which favors a developmental logic unlikely to do justice to the complex relations between texts. Reading Cathedral against the grain of the critical con- sensus shows how Cathedral revisits the bleak perspective of his earlier work and enables Carver to serve as an example of the need to enhance our understanding of modern literary careers. Keywords: Raymond Carver / modern career / Cathedral / surface reading / development “ I t has been said, repeatedly,” writes Carol Sklenicka in Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, “that the stories in Cathedral are fuller and more generous than Carver’s previous work” (408). She adds a qualifcation: this “belief” is founded on the diference between the “[Gordon] Lish-edited stories” in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and those in Cathedral, whereas “a truer reckoning may be made” by comparing the earlier stories before they were cut by Lish with the later ones (408). But even using the uncut stories for the comparison, Sklenicka repeats yet again the claim that Cathedral is “fuller and more generous” still and thus marks a critical juncture for Carver: it is a “book of richer perspective Jesse Zuba (jzuba@desu.edu) is the author of Te First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America (Princeton UP, 2016) and professor of English at Delaware State University. His work has appeared in American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Te Wallace Stevens Journal, and elsewhere.