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Date: Mon, 12 Sep 1994 16:56:02 GMT

Introduction: The New American Studies
                                       
                                       
From Myth to Rhetorics
                                       
The essays in this collection represent the work of a new
generation within American studies, and they define a new idea
of what it might mean to do American studies and how one would
go about doing it. They also represent the rich diversity of
explanations and materials in the study of American culture.
Films and photographs, Supreme Court decisions and industrial
manuals, educational and domestic theory, the popular culture
of Horatio Alger and the standard genres of domestic fiction: a
culture in its full institutional and individual variety is here
in play. At the same time, because these essays have been drawn
from the journal Representations they do not reach out to every
recent style or topic of analysis. To take one limitation,
Whitman is the only poet who plays a central part here.  One
way to characterize this new generation of American studies
would be to say that interest has passed from myth to rhetorics.
Myth in this perhaps too simple formula is always singular,
rhetorics always plural. Myth is a fixed, satisfying, and stable
story used again and again to normalize our account of social
life. By means of myth, novelty is tamed by being seen as the
repetition or, at most, the variation, of a known and valued
pattern. Even where actual historical situations are found to
fall short of myth or to lie in its aftermath, the myth tames
the variety of historical experience, giving it familiarity
while using it to reaffirm the culture's long-standing
interpretation of itself. Rhetoric, on the other hand, is a
tactic within the open questions of culture. It reveals
interests and exclusions.  To look at rhetorics is to look at
the action potential of language and images, not just their
power or contrivance to move an audience but also the location
of words, formulas, images, and ideological units of meaning
within politics. Rhetoric is the place where language is
engaged in cultural work, and such work can be done on, with,
or in spite of one or another social group. Rhetorics are
plural because they are part of what is uncertain or potential
in culture. They are the servants of one or another politics of
experience. Where there is nothing openly contested, no
cultural work to be done, we do not find the simplification
into one and only one rhetoric. Instead we find the absence of
the particular inflammation and repetition that rhetoric always
marks.  We find not rhetoric, but the ceremonial contentment of
myth.  Rhetorics are also distinct from ideology. In the term
ideology we rightly hear a combination of calculation and
cynicism about social truth, a schoolmaster's relation to his
pupils,indoctrination, and propaganda. Whether as reality or
hope, ideology implies that the legitimacy of
authority depends in part on a
monopoly on representation, and this is exactly the condition in
which rhetorics become irrelevant.
         To understand what a move from myth to rhetorics might
involve it is useful first to look at two things: how the claim
of a unitary myth worked and was used during the period we
mightcall the transfer of literature to the American
university; and the counter element to unitary myths within
American studies, the force of regionalism.
         
Myths and the University

         The new field of American studies came to maturity in
the years just before and after the Second World War.
Its description of American experience had as its audience
bothAmericans themselves and, even more important, a wider
world in which American culture had begun to work as a kind of
worldculture. Both Europeans and Americans were asked to
consider in mythic terms a prior state of American experience,
one whose essence and importance lay in the fact that it no
longer existed but had generated the cultural heart of American
experience.  But to this prior culture of Puritan mission,
frontier, wilderness, garden, and innocence contemporary
Americans were just as much outsiders as Europeans or Asians
were.
         In this charged pre- and postwar atmosphere of cultural
victory and cultural defeat, Americanists undertook the search
for a central myth of America. Such key works as Henry Nash
Smith's Virgin Land, Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden, R. W. B.
Lewis's American Adam, or Richard Slotkin's Regeneration
through Violence encouraged a study of literature, everyday
culture, and history around a shared mythic content that captured
American uniqueness and national identity. American studies as
an academic field in its first generation took this myth of
America to be its central topic and its method for linking the
classics of American poetry, fiction, and painting to the
everyday culture of images, newspapers, sermons, political
rhetoric, and especially to popular fiction and verse. Here the
western and the sermon met.
    The first of these all-encompassing myths of America had, in
fact, been defined half a century earlier. This was Frederic
Jackson Turner's frontier myth, a hypothesis, as Turner
called it, but ultimately a story rather than a scientific
speculation,a story whose appeal lay in the curious fact that
it describedjust those social features lost forever in the
official closing of the American frontier noted in the census of
1890.  Although Turner's great myth appeared before what we
might call the capture of American culture by the universities,
an event that took place in the 1930s and 1940s, his strategy
of discovering one fundamental fact or myth that explained
the identity of America as a nation set the stage for the mythic
castof the first generation of academic study of American
culture.  After the frontier myth, the second most important
global explanation was the myth of the Puritans: their mission,
the unique importance of intellectuals and ideology in
Puritan experience, the primacy of New
England's religious forms for American politics, and the residue
of Puritan energy, now invested in commerce and
self-cultivation, that remained as apermanent trace within
national character. If the frontier myth was a myth of the West,
the Puritan myth was a myth of New England culture, asserting
its right to an ongoing leadership in national life. Where the
western myth was democratic, based on the experience of
immigration and self-reliance, the New England myth was
ultimately a myth of the importance of intellectuals and, with
them, of the crucial role played by writing and by those who
provide ideology, self-description, and history, of the
importance, finally, of preachers and their descendants, the
intellectuals of the nineteenth century and the university
professors of the twentieth.
         In spite of the built-in resistance of American
literature and its awkward wellness, no cultural fact is more
important over the past fifty years than the wholesale movement
of every component of American literary life, past, present,
and future, into the universities. American studies and
American literature everywhere arrived at legitimacy.American
poets were signed up as writers in residence. Men and women of
letters, following Philip Rahv and Irving Howe, became
professors, trading in their general audience of educated
adults for a classroom full of students eighteen to twenty-five
years old, and for a secondary audienceof their professional
colleagues who had now become the mainreaders of their
opinions. Little magazines became subsidized by colleges, where
they too were now "in residence," and they found their primary
guaranteed sales to the periodical rooms of university
libraries. The paperback revolution of the fifties and sixties
that promised at first to democratize culture by making
inexpensive editions widely available ended up filling
bookstores with texts instead of books, texts designed for
adoption as required reading in courses.
    The high-level professional work on this new subject of
American literature has been shaped to a remarkable degree by
this residence of culture within the academic world.
Theuniversity and the professor think, as they must, in terms
of courses, that is, in terms of a coherent set of books or
themes that fit into the fifteen-week semester. Such
distinguished critical studies as F. O. Matthiesson's American
Renaissance, Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden, or Henry
Nash Smith's Virgin Land set out the past as a set of model
courses. The great interest in myths of the frontier, the
machine, the Puritan errand into the wilderness,American
violence or American individualism served to give shape to the
academic year in an ordered, consecutive, thematic way with
developments and oppositions. The problem of the American
romance as opposed to the novel, or the description of so
arbitrary a period of history as what is known as theGilded
Age, redesigned the past to fit the intellectual needs
and temporal rhythms of the newly professionalized study of the
past.
         The most common theme of the first generation
of Americanists was what could be
called the disappointment of myth by fact, the failure of
reality to live up to the ways in which it had been imagined.
America was first mythologized as the second Eden, its purpose
linked to the Puritan mission, or was pictured as a frontier or
free space for the unbounded individual, but then, in each
case, the myth was betrayed by fact. The promise was unkept,
the purity of what had been imagined grew stained over time.
American reality, by means of the apparatus of myth, always took
on the look of a fallen state. The frontier had been closed.
The high moral purpose of the Puritans had given way to commerce
and commercial purpose. The innocence had blood on its
hands.What was there had the look of heavily discounted
possibility.What might have been had been disappointed in the
act of making.
    Significantly, one of the master texts of this generation
was Henry James's The Ambassadors, perhaps from an academic
point of view the most perfect book ever written by an
American. James's hero, Strether, creates a myth of Paris, a
myth of his charge, Chad, a myth of Chad's relation to Mme de
Vionnet. Each myth is betrayed by fact, stained by the
complexity of the real world. An entire academic generation saw
its own love of criticism, observation, nuance,disappointment,
myth, and defeat in James's novel.
    As the great academic popularity of James's novel made
clear, if there has been one history lovingly traced by
intellectuals over the past fifty years it has been the
history of intellectuals themselves. Beginning with the work of
Perry Miller in the late thirties, the explanation of America as
a long history of Puritan hope and decline resulted from the
fact that academic intellectuals, looking into the past to find
not necessarily its chief actors but precisely thosecongenial
figures whose analytic and critical stance most resembled their
own, discovered in the Puritan writers what was for them the
most intelligible feature of the past, the one mirror most
filled with familiar features. They too were intellectuals,
engaged in holding up a mirror of admonition or exhortation to
their society. In theocratic New England they found embodied the
secret self-image of all intellectual cultures, a society in
which the critics and intellectuals were not marginal, but
actually in power.
    The Puritan intellectuals had their successors in the
radical critics of society from the mid-nineteenth century to
the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1930s utopian intellectuals of the
left found in the radical Puritans of three hundred years
earlier their own model for the role and the hoped-for
importance of the intellectual in politics and society. However
marginal intellectuals have actually been within American
culture, the study of America has reclaimed them.
    Useful though the history of intellectuals as written by
their own aspiring descendants might be, it is, in the end, a
rather timid look into the most friendly and probably
most unrepresentative district of the American past.  The actors
in the history of exploration and settlement, enterprise and
invention, city building, money, and
speculation in America, in the tangled history of black and
white, Native American and settler, and political and personal
rebellion have been the protagonists of the American story, even
if, unlike the intellectuals, they have seldom been their own
best historians.
         Myth creates a fault line between what ought to have
taken place and what did. It permits ideas and facts to
criticize each other. Like individual rebellion or reform
movements, myths embody what Henry Adams in his Autobiography
called "the spirit of resistance." The appetite for resistance
led Lionel Trilling to propose that all culture was basically
adversarial in the modern period, at war with the commonplace or
everyday social energies and beliefs. In European culture of the
nineteenth century this adversarial position reflected the
failure of self-belief among the emerging middle classes that
hadat last achieved political and cultural power equivalent to
theireconomic importance. But in America the source was quite
different. It lay in a utopian or even moral radicalism
combined with or concealing the resentment of artists and
intellectuals at their rather small voice in a national
lifedominated by business and politics.
         The belief in this spiritual radicalism led to a focus
on those writers like Melville who said their "No! In Thunder."
Melville's Pierre or Bartleby, Hawthorne's Hester Prynne,
Thoreauat Walden Pond or spending a night in jail, Henry James
withdrawn to England because American reality was not thick
enough: these defiant, adversarial figures and the meaning of
the challenging distance they created in standing out by standing
against their world are what the study of the tension between
fact and all that resisted fact brought to the center. One of
the aims of Sacvan Bercovitch's essay on Hawthorne in this
volume is to dissolve the hold of such complacent descriptions
of the adversarial. Within American studies the study of America
had become the study of dissent. The rebels and dissidents came
to the front as the leading patriots. It was the era of
Thoreau, Henry Adams, and Bartleby, not of Emerson and Whitman.
The search for central myths, myths already closed off,like the
frontier at the moment it was first described as the single most
vital experience for American identity, wasinseparable from the
study of resistance within culture, whether in the gothic style
of Melville's Pierre, the reflective emigre style of James's
Ambassadors, or the self-ironic style of Henry Adams's
Education.
         By an accident of timing, American literature arrived
in the university at a highly politicized moment. Its arrival
coincided with the polarization between right and left or,
in European terms, between fascism and communism, in the
period between the two world wars. The study of resistance was
attractive in part because both the conservative right and the
liberal left had each rejected one key feature of what had been
a synthesis in the most vital parts of nineteenth-century
American culture. The right was hostile to democracy; the left
to capitalism. Both shared a distrust of
the optimism, energy, confidence,
and what might be called the surprisingly guiltless relation
that figures like Emerson,Whitman, Cooper, or Parkman had to
their own past. The lack of apology or contrition, the robust
confidence in the right to be where and as they were in spite of
slavery, Indian massacres, the failures of national politics to
be dignified or even honest, the violence of the West, the
polyglot hustle of the new cities--such guiltless self-regard
seemed shallow to a left and to a right equally convinced of the
nightmare of history. A whole new meaning of the term innocence
had to be invented to make it seem that only some youthful
unawareness of evil could explain the pride or health of Twain,
Whitman, William James, or Emerson.
         That the very greatest figures of American literature
were not oppositional figures seemed almost beyond belief. But
it was a fact. There is no margin of frictional energy that
accounts for Emily Dickinson or Dreiser or Faulkner. Whitman
and Emerson continue to embarrass by their failure to have seen
through democracy and capitalism, or rather by their having
imagined themselves to have seen into the philosophic and
temperamental depths of those two systems and to have found
them both profound and humane, exhilarating and enduring.
         
         
Regionalism and Central Culture

             Alongside the search for grand unifying myths, with
their inevitable narrative of a fall into imperfection and
disappointment, a second element shared the stage. This second
element was the claim of pluralism within American culture.
This diversity, which resists the single shelter of myth or
ideology, has again and again risen to dominance in what we
might call the episodes of regionalism in American cultural
history.
         Cultural life in America swings like a pendulum between
a diversity of sectional voices and an ever-new project of
unity, between the representation of the nation as made up of
weakly joined districts and the representation of a central
national order.  Some 150 years ago the then strongly sectional
culture was split along geographical lines:  the New England
mind, the Southern way of life, the West of the pioneer with
his energy and his violence. Each section had its own voices
and themes, its own philosophies and religions, its unique
spirit and humor. A new common identity was only rebuilt out of
these regionalisms by the Civil War, by the mythic figure of
Lincoln, by the railroads and telegraph
that reconquered a geography grown too
large for the earlier Federal unity of Washington and
Jefferson, and by the elaboration of an American way of life
made up of Singer sewing machines, Coca-Cola, Remington rifles,
and Ford Model T's--a common way of life created around
democratically available mass- produced goods rather than by
the right to vote or own property.
         
    Each swing to regionalism splits the country along different
fault lines and each re-won unity involves not a return to a
lost identity, but a new plane of association. In
earlytwentieth-century America a new regionalism that was not
geographic but ethnic appeared as a result of massive
immigration. The local "color" was not that of climates and
regions, but of hyphenated Americans: JewishİAmericans,
Italian-Americans, Irish- Americans, Wasps and Chinese-
Americans, Poles, Swedes, and Russians. This was a regionalism
of languages, folk customs, humor, music, and beliefs set over
against the pull of what came to be called Americanization.
         In this case it was not the railroads and the everyday
objects of a thriving economy that created the unifying force.
To this ethnic regionalism was opposed the core culture of the
system of public education and the incentive of economic
advancement always purchased at the price of a surrendered
culture, most obviously by the requirement of the schools and
the business world that the English language be used.  A third
unifying force was mobility itself. Only by remaining within a
ghetto, the ghetto of arrival, could the coherence of language,
ways of life, religion, and, most important, marriage within
the ethnic group be preserved. To move even once was to enter
the general American condition.
         Again in this case, the two world wars and the common
democratic experience of the army worked, as the Civil War or
the Revolutionary War had earlier, to fuse a new identity that
superseded the ethnic diversity of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. The pots in which the melting
actually occurred were the schoolroom, the new offices of the
business world, and the fields of battle. Unity within American
culture has always been a postwar unity, whether federalist
after the Revolution, capitalist after
the Civil War, or contemporary American after, and resulting
from, the two world wars that ended in 1945.
         In recent years a further episode of regionalism has
begun. The regionalism of the past decades has been neither
geographical nor ethnic.  It comes on the heels of the
generation that elaborated the myth of America in the shadow
and aftermath of World War II. The regionalism of our own times
is a regionalism of gender and race. The civil rights movement
after 1954 had as a cultural corollary the debate over black
identity in America. The women's movement that followed, just
as the nineteenth-century suffrage movement had followed and
drawn its vocabulary from abolitionism, set the model for the
denial of what came to be called "essentialism," the claim to
an overriding common identity. Later gay and lesbian identity
movements, along with ethnic identities now conceived not on
the model of the earlier hyphenated identities, but on the more
radical model of black or female identity, reopened the full
spectrum of regionalized culture. Native American, Chicano,
gay, black, lesbian, female: a third episode of regionalism
once again set out its claims, in this case against a central
technological culture made up of the new media, television and
film, and also of the older forces of education and mass
representation.  The model that black or female identity set in
place for regionalism was refractory in a novel way because
these regional-as opposed to universal--models were the first
within American experience that would never be altered by
either mobility or the succession of generations in a culture
where intermarriage was common. Earlier geographic or ethnic
identities were episodic in that the very mechanisms of the
culture itself would erase them over time. To be black or
female was an unnegotiable identity, and insofar as other
groups, including ethnic groups, took over the black model,
they chose to see their own regional identity, their identity
at birth, as final.
         In American universities, the newly founded departments
of American studies of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, found
themselves in the 1960s and 1970s quickly regionalized into
departments of black or Afro-American studies, Jewish studies,
women's studies, Native American studies, Chicano and
Asian-American studies, and in some cases, gay studies. One
aspect of these new identity claims was an aggressive unmasking
of the myths of the previous generation, among other things as
an overwhelmingly white male myth of America. The pastoral, the
Western, the Puritan mission, the frontier experience of
individualism, self-reliance, and democratic values: all had at
their center white male actors with various supporting casts.
         The new American studies has grown up alongside but
also as an alternative or aftermath to this regionalism that
tore apart the various unifying and singular myths of America.
The key limitations to this new regionalism, as well as of all
earlier regionalisms, were its need to define itself and its
ability to thrive only within a highly politicized atmosphere.
Regionalism is always, in America, part of a civil war within
representation. It is seldom or never a matter of tolerance,
the blooming of a thousand, or even of three, flowers. In the
regionalism of the past decades, identity is formed by
opposition: black/white, female/male, Native American / settler,
gay / heterosexual. Because of this opposition, identity is
located above all in the sphere of politics, that is, in the
sphere of felt opposition, of movements, laws, demands,
negotiations over representation, and, in the university, in
struggle over curriculum and requirements.
         The new American studies has stood outside this
regionalism by locating a set of underlying but permanently open
national facts around which all identities are shaped and with
which the many rhetorics of our culture are engaged. Among
these permanently open, that is, never won nor lost, national
facts are democratic culture and its demands; the culture of
freedom that permits conditions of dominance, whether economic,
sexual, or cultural, and has permitted even permutations of
slavery as one aspect of the nature of freedom itself; the
creation of a national life that is economic rather than
religious or, in the anthropological sense, cultural.  This
troubled utopian core of enterprise, freedom, and democratic
culture baffled by the preexisting social facts while never
surrendering to them is essential to the cultural analyses in
the essays of this book.
         
         
         
         
The Civil War within Representation

             One consequence of the new American studies has
been to rethink the traditional concept of the American
Renaissance, replacing it with the new category of a literature
located within the Civil War over slavery and driven by the
particular concepts of freedom and independence, politics and
compromise, that the Civil War period, with its preparation and
aftermath, froze into place. Recent European historical work,
particularly Reinhart Koselleck's
essays on the concept of revolution in his book Futures Past,
has focused on the part played by civil wars in the grounding
and contesting of national identity in the three hundred years
between the European Thirty Years War and the English civil war
of the seventeenth century and the end of the general European
civil war of 1914-1945. Like the U.S. Civil War and the French
and Russian revolutions with their phases of civil war, all
such wars put at risk the very existence of the society itself
in the name of uncompromisable values. Periods of civil war are
periods without ideology because two or more rhetorics of
self-representation, national purpose, and historical genealogy
are in wide enough circulation to elicit complete support, even
to the point that people are willing to die for them.
         The very idea of a period like that known as the
American Renaissance leads us to look for a unified set of ideas
and aesthetic practices, which we come to think of as the
ideology of the period. Writers can be arranged as expressing
or dissenting from that ideology.  Notions of ideology and
dissent and of period identity and an authoritative discourse
within each period are all interdependent. Once the concept of
civil war as a normative situation within representation
replaces that of ideology, this entire array of concepts falls
away in tandem.
         In literary studies of recent years what has been
called the new historicism has, as a result of the strong
influence of Foucault and the modern experience of
totalitarianism and its analysis by Hannah Arendt and Max
Horkheimer, among others, focused on the fate of representation
within absolutist states or societies. The English Renaissance,
taken as a glorious period of monarchy along with its secondary
pressures and exceptions, became the natural topic for new
historicist demonstrations.
         The condition of civil war can be taken as the
fundamental alternative to the condition of monarchical power,
self-display, uniform discourse, ideology, and controlled
representation. American new historicism has its basis in the
representational situation not of monarchy but of civil war. To
see the central episode of American history as the Civil War is
to bring to the front the power of rhetorics, incomplete
dominance of representation, and the borrowing or fusing of
successful formulas of representation. Civil wars between
contemporaries are only a local version of what, to use an
Emersonian formulation, should be seen as the fundamental,
permanent civil war in any society that is, like the United
States, an economy rather than a culture. That underlying,
permanent civil war, as Emerson described it in his essay on
Napoleon, is between the young and the old, between power that
represents work done in the past and the effort of the young to
displace all that is being defended in order to make room for
themselves in the world. Railroads overthrew canals and
water-based transportation, and no sooner had they succeeded
than the passenger automobile and long-distance truck overthrew
the railroad. No sooner did Western Union have a monopoly on
long distance communication than the new telephone industry
appeared to make that monopoly worthless.
         The representational topic of monarchy is the
inheritance, diffusion, and protection of power already held.
The topic of civil war is an unstable contest for short-term
control that is uninheritable and in the end, indefensible.
Power is not the topic of this historicism, but its weak
long-term expectations within a culture where economic power is
not located in land, that one genuinely scarce, readily
transferable, and not easily variable basis of power.
         Of the essays in this collection more than half examine
alternative rhetorics within the public sphere of the
mid-nineteenth-century experience of the war over slavery, its
abolitionist foreground, and its reconstructionist and New
South aftermath. In the photographic images of the war itself
Alan Trachtenberg reads the rhetoric of representation as it
appeared within the camera, which, like the machine gun, was
one of the new instruments of the war. The very existence of
war photographs for the first time, alongside day-by-day
newspaper reporting from the battlefield, set up a contest for
the control and definition of this new visual genre.
         Thirty years after the war, the rhetoric that Eric J.
Sundquist sees consolidated in the Supreme Court's Plessy
decision exists over against the liberal rhetoric of
Reconstruction that it defeats by means not only legal and
political but representational and scientific. The borrowed
force of genetics, of the theories of degeneration, and of the
successfully mythologized history of the South all become
components of the consolidation both in the Plessy case and in
Mark Twain's novel Pudd'nhead Wilson.
         The reconstruction of imagery can clearly be seen
between the Civil War photographs that are Alan Trachtenberg's
concern, the photographs and drawings that are the topic of
Henry Louis Gates's essay on the reconstruction of the image of
the black, and, finally, the rhetoric of the first classic of
the American film industry, Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,
which Michael Rogin examines in his essay. That these two new
representational forms, photograph and film, both situated
themselves at once around the rhetorical struggles of the
culture rather than around its celebratory myths is part of the
evidence for the surplus of energy around discord within
democratic cultures.
         
         In looking at the prewar period and its literature both
Sacvan Bercovitch and Richard H. Brodhead locate a key
transformation within rhetoric traceable to the unresolved
history that would soon produce the war. Bercovitch traces the
liberal political rhetoric of compromise to the historic
Compromise of 1850 over slavery and to the anxiety over the
European revolutions of 1848. This rhetoric of compromise
becomes the foundation of a secular politics free of the
vocabulary and rhetoric of the Puritan mission. That such a
secular and liberal politics establishes itself as the successor
to Puritan history Bercovitch brilliantly shows in his analysis
of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Brodhead traces the struggle in
the same prewar years between two rhetorics of discipline, one
strongly marked by the discipline of the whip within slavery,
the other deriving from the tender domesticity of family life.
The rhetoric of disciplinary intimacy, as he calls it, defines
educational theory, the personalization of power in the family,
and the growing importance of the domestic and the sentimental
as modes of thought with implications for all larger social
questions.
         The transfer of energy and ammunition from one moment
of rhetoric to another is the subject of Karen Sanchez-Eppler's
essay on abolitionism and feminism. Rhetorics are borrowed or
transferred, or they are composed into genial or unlikely
hybrids. The interplay of rhetorics of seduction and genteel
philanthropy and the emergence of a hybrid energy that is part
of the cultural force of the Horatio Alger myth are the topics
of Michael Moon's essay on the Horatio Alger stories.
         The heart of this collection of essays is the central
problem of the projection of white and black identity as an
ongoing, ever-reconstructed cultural matter. All other cultural
matters imitate the dynamic of this fated American problem of
representation. Each culture has its central problem within
representation. For English culture that problem was and
remains one of class. The features of this representational crux
are borrowed, granulated, reassembled, reused, and copied until
they appear in variant or disguised forms throughout the
culture. In her essay Karen Sanchez-Eppler demonstrates the
transfer of the structure of racial representation to American
feminism, a feminism that inevitably exists in the aftermath of
abolitionist energy whether in the nineteenth century or in the
1960s when a particularly effective feminist generation
followed in the wake of a strong civil rights movement. Michael
Moon's essay on class and homosexual-heterosexual constructions
carries over the mechanisms crafted within the racial sphere
into the economic and the sexual.
         This topic gives a model for the strong hold of a
democratic system of representation on works of high culture. So
active, persistent, and even violent is the multiplication of
images around a social fact like that of race that the capacity
of Melville, Stowe, Twain, or Griffiths to work outside or even
to modify the everyday cultural work of newspapers, jokes,
legal argument and decisions, and political or social
description of all kinds is limited in a unique way. The
constraint on representation by ordinary culture is one of the
clear results within the new American studies.



Print Culture without the State

             The ordinary culture within which classic American
authors and painters have worked has to be called a print
culture, but now understood in a wider sense than the culture
of the printed book.  A photograph is also called a print, as
is the copy of a film.  Newspapers and journals, advertisements
and billboards are also, in this sense, prints, offprints, and
reprints. In the first essay of this collection Michael Warner
sets out the model of the printer Benjamin Franklin with his
new-made career within print culture, a culture replacing the
oral culture of sermons, oratory, and statements linked to the
personal presence of the speaker and the speaker's
identification with his or her words.  After Franklin all
American authors, photographers, and film-makers are printers.
         The insertion of women into this ongoing authorial role
and the replacement of the rhetoric of the lady novelist with a
new self- representation is the subject that Elaine Showalter
examines in the case of America's first successful high,
cultural woman novelist, Edith Wharton.  Writing in 1905,
Wharton appeared in the wake of a century of male novelists
stretching from Cooper through Hawthorne, Melville, Howells,
Twain, and James who had successfully made themselves into what
the Victorians called classics. She also wrote her way out of
the model of the lady novelist, the genteel or moral female
scribbler, the type of popular writer whose presence and
success had created a counter-tradition to the classic American
literature that D. H. Lawrence described in 1920.
         Both Warner and Showalter picture their author on the
borderland between rhetorics of self-representation; at the same
time each takes this writer as a model or pioneer within a
general cultural shift. In Franklin's case the shift is from
norms of oral culture to norms of rationality and print
culture, with the new possibility to exploit self-separation,
deception, and self-fabrication once the person and the word do
not appear together in social space.
         Franklin and Wharton individually invent and embody new
cultural roles: a unique personal achievement seems to capture
and direct the wider culture.  In the essays by Sacvan
Bercovitch and Eric J.  Sundquist we see the opposite process:
Hawthorne and Twain receive and condense cultural models that
surround them, models that outweigh the individual work and
saturate it from without.
         As pairs of essays, the Franklin and Wharton on the one
side and the Hawthorne and Twain on the other can be taken as
contrasting examples of causation in literary studies, opposite
explanations of the direction along which energy flows within
culture. To see Franklin or Wharton as a pioneer in whose
career a larger cultural shift can be observed is to credit the
individual with the capacity to break the only existing model
that she or he finds at his or her moment of cultural entrance.
Energy and causation flow out from singular instances of
success. In the studies of Hawthorne and Twain, however, it is
the far more complex cultural strategies and the local
combinations of the wider culture in its struggle to go on
reformulating unanswered, never completely won or completely
lost wars of representation that put before the artist a local
habitation for his or her energy.
         In this light my own essay on Whitman and Melville
within the demands of a democratic social space describes the
wider cultural collision between the project of democracy in
aesthetics and in economics, the two realms where that project
has been most necessary and most unlikely, and the fact of an
already damaged social space. The strategies for satisfying the
aesthetic project, on the one hand, and for dealing with the
already damaged social space are at one level just the
rhetorical inventions or preoccupations of Whitman or Melville.
But they exist as outcomes of the larger cultural pressure and
requirement and, at the same time, within the limits of the
specific resources of that culture. In my reading those
resources were always richest and most democratic on the
economic plane.
         The individual author is replaced as the object of
attention in the essays by Richard H. Brodhead on disciplinary
intimacy and Walter Benn Michaels on the outcome, in the works
of a cluster of authors, of the interlaced rhetorics of
individualism and machine industrial processes at the end of
the nineteenth century. Michaels's topic is the fusion of what
would seem at first opposite vocabularies of standardization
and individualism, machine and self. His analysis captures a
moment of oxymoron within naturalism, and also within American
educational thinking and factory organization. Brodhead
describes a cultural break between one disciplinary system and
the new system of affective disciplinary intimacy and its
outcome in a set of mid-century novels.
         At the larger level of rhetoric, Brodhead's history by
succession and Michael's history by superimposition set in front
of us the two basic models for new historicism: transition and
paradox. Of the essays that deal explicitly with two rhetorics,
those by Michael Warner, Elaine Showalter, Richard Brodhead,
Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Eric Sundquist, and Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., set in front of us the replacement of one rhetoric by
another. The essays by Sacvan Bercovitch, Sharon Cameron,
Philip Fisher, Michael Moon, Alan Trachtenberg, and Walter Benn
Michaels confront us with the paradoxical side-by-side relation
between strategies that we would expect to see only in conflict
and opposition. One important claim being made by this latter
group of essays is that opposition, resistance, and the
sharpening of representations so that we can face such choices
as those between subversion and collusion, opposition and
participation, and victory and defeat are less significant goals
within representation than we usually imagine. Fusion,
compounding, and the delay or evasion of choice are often the
marks of a latent civil war. Thisis clear in Walter Benn
Michaels's essay, where we would expect the combination of the
factory system in a culture of individualism, the moment of
unions and bosses in America, and the aggressive methods of
literary naturalism to work together to moralize the late
nineteenth-century situation, and to do so by sharpening
differences into opposites that invite choice and by promoting
consciousness, whether class consciousness orsimply
consciousness at large. Instead we find a systemic blending, an
avoidance of transition from one coherent model to another. We
find ourselves with a picture of a culture living on in spite
of the requirements of facing up to its contradictions and
improvisations, a culture making successful, short-term use of
opposites precisely because it has no interest in finding its
way to any long-term, stable, integrated identity or ideology.
     The essays in this collection center on nineteenth-century
American texts, and they do so for a reason. These texts have
always been the battleground where shifts in national
self-conception and the accompanying shifts in the cultural
projects of a generation are fought out.The cultural facts that
we renovate, filter out, discard, or rediscover are among the
most highly visible clues to what we imagine ourselves to be.
The past of yesterday is not necessarily our past.
      No figure has been reargued as often as Emerson, and yet
the central part of Emerson, or some one of the many different
accounts of Emerson, is again prominent in the recent reworking
of the past.The Emerson of Sharon Cameron's essay is a figure
of paradox, a man whose discovery of the thin hold of grief over
his imagination, even the grief over his dead child, has given
him a pattern for the nature of experience in general and a
triumphant affirmation based on what might seem to be his own
callousness. From Emerson's consciousness of what we could call
not his refusal to mourn but his failure to mourn he passes to
the knowledge that experience itself is in its nature
dissociated, and further, that an ever-mobile present anchors
us in spite of the intense claims of the past, even when that
past is the recent loss of a child. Cameron's reading of the
clash between the rhetoric of grief and the rhetoric of
experience has its strongest evidence in the very dissociation
of Emerson's own aphoristic style.  Stronger than that
dissociation, however brave or reckless, is the collapse of one
rhetoric into another as in the startling sentences: "We thrive
by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual." In this
wordplay on the accidental, the injurious, and the shallow that
Cameron isolates in the essay "Experience," Emerson packs the
bitter knowledge of a set of puns like those in Shakespeare's A
Winters Tale but without its darkness. Here the feckless is
raised to the philosophical.
      The strong outcome of deconstructive readings can be seen
in the layering of language in Cameron's reading of Emerson,
Bercovitch's of Hawthorne, my own of Melville, and Michaels's
of the cultural languages of individualism and standardization.
Syntax gets particular attention here as a level where the
undecided can be stabilized, but not resolved, asin the many
either/or structures in Melville. In Bercovitch's essay it is
Hawthorne's structures of negation that accomplish this
syntactic work. Deconstruction's most enduring outcome has been
its powerful analytic techniques in the face of brief crux
passages. In this respect, deconstruction extended but did not
reverse the techniques of close reading that dominated literary
study in the 1950s. Ultimately, deconstructive analysis was
rhetorical; it was an analysis of tropes and layers within
representation. The historicizing of this rhetorical analysis
can be seen in the rapid sketch of Emerson that appears in one
of Bercovitch's notes: "Emersonian troping is nothing less than
a transvaluation of the entire process of westwarding into an
interior process of vision that re-presents America as
potential. In effect, Emerson marshals the rhetoric of progress
against imperialism; self-possession against possessive
individualism; transition against upward mobility; marginality
against the facts of the frontier; speculation against the
marketplace; and summarily 'America' against the United States.
This is adversarial rhetoric but also an example par excellence
of cultural counterdependence." In this brilliant passage
setting rhetoric against rhetoric the deconstructive and the
historical are perfectly fused.
         Unlike myths, which take on all possible historical
circumstances as illustrations and by this means become
universal explanations, rhetorical analysis is never universal.
One important reason for the local nature of the analysis of
rhetorics found in these essays is the lack of what might be
called, in the European sense, the state in American experience
and therefore the absence of any monopoly of either power or
violence on the part of the state. Centralization of power on
the European model, and with it the centralization of the power
of representation and self-conception as it has been described
by Foucault, was never present in America.  Even outside the
arena of cultural conflict, or civil war per se, the culture
provided the richest possible resources for escape,
invisibility, and defiance. The right to "move on" or "head out
west" was only one of these possibilities that limited the
creation of a state. More important was the economic commitment
to a rapidly changing culture of invention, with its dizzy
cycles of the amassing, loss, and transfer of wealth and power.
This economic commitment was far more
decisive than the purely individual right to escape or move on,
but even that apparently individual mobility was historically
profound because it was the means of renewing the act of
immigration--leaving behind and moving on-which was each
individual's first drop of American identity.
    In fact, such an economic pressure is a form of willed,
collective instability because it accepts the future as an
already bankable asset that can be borrowed against to speed up
the overthrow of the past. In a speculative culture, the
profits of the railroads fall into an investment pool, where,
because they are in search of the highest returns, they are not
reinvested in the railroad system itself but rather in the
emerging automobile industry whose only purpose is to overthrow
the railroads as the fundamental transportation system. By
means of the speculative system the past becomes the silent
partner of the future that will abolish its own hold. A culture
of speculation is opposite in its action to those cultures of
preservation, inheritance, and self-reproduction that we tend to
take anthropologically as the human norm. Pierre Bourdieu's
Outline of a Theory of Practice, precisely because it is
concerned with societies whose primary goal is reproduction in
the widest sense of self-replication and continuation as is
over time, can never describe an Emersonian or speculative
society whose commitment to self-destruction in the name of its
own next possibility is far more important than its interest in
the transfer of the forms of the past to a future generation.
         For these reasons, analysis within American studies
will always be of sectors of a diverse culture characterized by
the absence of a monopoly of power. These studies will always
be historical and not anthropological because of the commitment
of the culture itself to a rapid building up, wearing out, and
replacement of systems of all kinds by new arrays of persons
and forces. The updraft is strong, the door of immigration both
to and within the country is open, the exhaustion of control is
always imminent, and control itself is porous. Because America
had no experience of monarchy, it has a permanent democratic
core working not only against the centralization of power but,
more important, against its inheritance or preservation over
time.
    In the absence of a state we find ourselves freed of the
intellectual component of the systematic state: ideology. We
have rhetorics because we have no ideology, and we have no
ideology because we lack the apparatus of ideology: a national
religion, a unitary system of education under the control of
the state, a cultural life and media monopolized by the state
by means of either ownership or subsidy. Ideology is a cultural
mechanism of stabilization and transmission, neither of which
is a primary topic of a culture of speculation.
    The study of rhetorics is our necessary alternative to the
study of ideology. Rhetorics are the sign of the play of forces
within cultural life and at the same time of the power of
invention and obsolescence within culture. Rhetoric is the mark
of temporary location and justification. The nuances of
provisional justification and defense, the opening up of
newness within culture without escaping the grip of the master
problems and resources of the culture: this is what is at issue
in the essays that follow.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
PART 1




Authors, Careers, and the Transitions
between Phases of Culture