CHAPTER THIRTEEN

                      The Promise of American               
                        Literature Studies


"Again the role of the national literature in shaping the nation's
identity became a subject for debate."
                                      --RlCHARD RULAND

"American studies has not had the influence on other disciplines
that one might expect and has produced an interdisciplinary
subfield rather than a reorganization of knowledge."
                                      --JONATHAN CULLER


     Because the New Criticism has been the most discussed of
the postwar academic methodologies and the one that has had the
most influence on pedagogy, we are prone to forget that it was
never more than one among many. The direction of postwar
academic literary studies was interdisciplinary as much as it
was intrinsic.  Yet even observers who clearly know better can
say that "there was hardly a movement" from the late twenties
to the late fifties "that did not subscribe to the tenet that
such 'extrinsic' disciplines as psychology, sociology, and
philosophy represented a threat of contamination to the
contextual purity of serious literature." That this is not
wholly the case is implied by this very commentator, who quotes
Northrop Frye's complaint in Anatomy of Criticism about
proliferating "determinisms in criticism . . . Marxist,
Thomist, liberal-humanities, neo-Classical, Freudian, Jungian,
or existentialist, ... all proposing, not to find a conceptual
framework for criticism within literature, but to attach
criticism to one of a miscellany of frameworks outside it."
     As Frye's statement negatively suggests, though
"interdisciplinary" is a latter-day term, what it denotes was
well under way by the late forties and perceived to be so. In
his 1948 survey, The Armed Vision, Stanley Edgar Hyman actually
characterized "modern criticism" (if only "crudely and somewhat
inaccurately") as "the organized use of non-literary techniques
and bodies of knowledge to obtain insights into literature."
Hyman's exemplary critics were those who borrowed
systematically from extraliterary disciplines: Richards
(linguistics and psychology), Maud Bodkin (anthropology),
Kenneth Burke (sociology and rhetoric), Christopher Caudwell
(Marxism); and even in his chapters on Richards and Empson what
interested Hyman was their importation of concepts from
linguistics and psychology. In the offing was Frye, whose
system of myths, modes, and genres would make it possible to
blur distinctions among literature, religion, popular
entertainment, and advertising as expressions of common
patterns of mythic identification.
     So far had the interdisciplinary trend penetrated
criticism by the late forties that by then the counterreaction
against it had already begun. The attraction to the New
Criticism for some came from the concern that interdisciplinary
methodology was becoming so powerful as to obscure the
integrity of literature itself, a concern that does not first
date from reactions against poststructuralism or neo-Marxism.
Randall Jarrell worried in 1952 that, judging from Hyman's
title and other indications in The Armed Vision, "the ideal
modern critic" would "resemble one of those robots you meet in
science-fiction stories, with a microscope for one eye, a
telescope for the other, and a mechanical brain at Harvard for a
heart." "Critics," Jarrell observed, "are so much better armed
than they used to be in the old days: they've got tanks and
flame-throwers now, and it's harder to see past them to the work
of art -- in fact, magnificent creatures that they are, it's
hard to want to see past them."
     Though one can appreciate Jarrell's alarm at the
implications of an "armed" criticism, the problem arguably lay
not in the presence of new weaponry, to retain the figure, but
in what it might be used to do or not do. Given the advances in
interdisciplinary method that Hyman had described, and given the
widespread agreement by now that criticism and history should
seek to merge, it might at last have been possible to situate
the work of the literature department in a larger study of
cultural history without simply reducing literature to a
"reflection" of sociological conditions or the history of
ideas. Implicit in the new interdisciplinary methods was a
redefinition and reorganization of literary studies that
promised finally to confront some of their chronic problems.
     Yet this redefinition and reorganization did not take
place, and some of the reasons why not are suggested by the
trajectory of one field, American literature studies, that from
its inception was peculiarly tied to the project of overcoming
the gulf between literature and its sociohistorical contexts.
Jonathan Culler has argued that the field of "American
Studies," which arose after World War I, has aimed at "a major
reorganization of knowledge around what it takes to be the
central question: what is American culture and how did it get
to be the way it is?" Yet Culler observes, rightly in my view,
that the promised reorganization of knowledge failed to occur.
Why, when conditions seemed ripe for the creation of a study of
culture that would overcome the old compartmentalizations and
fragmentations, did such a study not materialize?

                 AMERICAN LITERATURE STUDIES

     College courses in American literature existed before
World War I -- quite a few, in fact -- but they were sporadic
and their emphasis usually was on history rather than
literature.  According to Fred Lewis Pattee, surveying the
history of the college study of American literature in 1925,
the first course "distinctively marked 'American Literature'"
was offered at the University of Michigan in 1875 by Moses Coit
Tyler, whom Pattee credits as "the first to make the history of
American literature a separate academic subject in an American
university" and "the first to study American literature against
the background of American history." Yet, in Tyler's classes at
Ann Arbor, "according to the testimony of his students, it was
hard sometimes to determine whether the subject they had just
heard lectured upon was history or literature." When Tyler went
to Cornell in 1881, "he announced at the start that in all his
courses he intended to 'use American literature as a means of
illustrating the several periods of American history.' He was
ahead of his times even for the new and radical Cornell. It was
not till 1897 that his college caught up with him and added to
its curriculum an unattached course in the history of American
literature."
     Pattee credited the women's colleges as pioneers in
introducing American literature -- noting courses that appeared
in the 1880s at Smith, Wellesley, and Mount Holyoke. Dartmouth
and the University of Wisconsin initiated courses in 1883,
under C.  F.  Richardson (with whom Pattee studied) and J. C.
Freeman.  These courses -- and the concurrently appearing
American literature textbooks and histories -- aroused protests,
for the very idea of "American literature" was to many minds a
laughable contradiction in terms. Properly speaking, it was
said, "there is no such thing" as American literature, "unless
the pictorial scratchings of aborigines on stones and birch
bark are to be classed as literary productions. Every piece of
literary work done in the English language by a man or woman
born to the use of it is a part of that noble whole which we
call English literature."
     When this sort of academic prejudice was overcome, it was
because "some member of the English department in some way
became interested in [American literature] and had influence
enough to secure what he desired." This occurred often enough
that by 1900, according to Pattee, "American literature as an
independent subject had been introduced into practically all of
the American colleges" (I shall pass over the exceptions here).
They could hold out, he observes, only until the World War,
when the "demands upon the colleges for patriotism-inducing
subjects" caused American literature to be added to the
curriculum everywhere. By 1925, according to Pattee, the battle
had "been so completely won now that many of the younger
generation of American literature teachers even have never
heard of it."
     Early teachers of American literature tended to adopt an
apologetic view of their subject. Like Barrett Wendell in his
Literary History of America (1900), they defended American
literature with faint praise or apologized for it, but they did
not question the assumption that whatever was of value in it
was a product of New England and therefore predominantly
British in spirit. In a celebrated witticism, Pattee remarked
that the title of Wendell's book should have been "A Literary
History of Harvard University, with Incidental Glimpses of the
Minor Writers of America." Textbooks still treated American
literature as an expression of traditional New England idealism,
much as Rufus Griswold and Clarence Stedman had treated it in
the mid-nineteenth century.
     A typical attitude was expressed by Reverend Henry Van Dyke
of Princeton, who, in his 19IO book The Spirit of America
(reissued in 1922), argued that American literature
characteristically approached "life from the point of view of
responsibility" and gave "full value to those instincts,
desires, and hopes in man which have to do with the unseen
world." Van Dyke acknowledged that there were American writers
"who are moved by a sense of revolt against the darkness and
severity of certain theological creeds," but he added that even
in such cases "the attempt is not to escape from religion, but
to find a clearer, nobler, and more loving expression of
religion." The "characteristic note of the literature of
America," Van Dyke said, was to take "for granted that there is
a God, that men must answer to him for their actions, and that
one of the most interesting things about people, even in books,
is their moral quality."
     Bliss Perry expressed a similar view in 19I2, arguing that
"our American literature . . . is characteristically a citizen
literature, responsive to the civic note." Perry detected a
Puritanical "thinness or bloodlessness" in Cooper and Poe and
argued that the most valuable American literature lay not in
fiction and poetry but in public writings such as the
Federalist and in town-meeting oratory and sermons.  Even
America's preachers seemed to deserve more attention than its
novelists and poets, for they had "performed the function of men
of letters without knowing it" and had been "treated with too
scant respect in the histories of American literature." For
Perry, as for Van Dyke, James Whitcomb Riley was a major
American poet.
     This view that civic uplift was the defining quality of
American literature was initially intensified by World War I and
its aftermath. I quoted in an earlier chapter Pattee's remark
that an "educational Monroe doctrine" had appeared after the
war, declaring "for Americans American literature." And I
quoted Pattee's own comment in 19I9 that "the American soul,
the American conception of democracy -- Americanism, should be
made prominent in our school curriculum, as a guard against the
rising spirit of experimental lawlessness which has followed
the great war." Textbooks like the one this remark appeared in
still presented American literature much as Brander Matthews
had in the nineties, as an exemplification of the march of the
"English speaking race . . . as this race is steadily spreading
abroad over the globe."
     But freeing itself from such overt patriotic uplift was
virtually a condition of the constituting of American literature
as a professional field. Academic Americanists tended to be more
sensitive than their antiquarian colleagues to critical trends
outside the university, and they could not but be aware that
patriotic uplift was on the defensive in those circles, as it
was becoming irrelevant in professional quarters. Since Van
Wyck Brooks's call for a "usable past" before the war,
nonacademic critics had been developing a heterodox criticism
of American culture, attacking the genteel canon of Longfellow
and Riley, endorsing the naturalists, reviving unpopular
writers like Melville, Dickinson, and Thoreau, and scorning
everything "academic." Academic Americanists bridled under such
criticism, but they tended to modify their own tastes
accordingly. Pattee, for example, whose career spanned the
preprofessional and the mature period of American literary
studies and whose tastes reflected the conflicts between the
two, wondered in 1925 whether the typical "old professor" whom
the young intellectuals were assaulting had not become obsolete.
     By the late twenties, such defensive resignation had given
way to a positive sense of corporate mission, most dramatically
illustrated in the manifesto published in 1928, The
Reinterpretation of American Literature. The new sense of
mission drew its energy from the nationalist pieties released
by the war, but with a crucial difference. For though the
contributors to the Reinterpretation urged the need to
revitalize the concept of an American national literature, their
immediate interest was not in shoring up patriotic ideals but
in overcoming the fragmentation of the academic disciplines. It
is significant that the editor of the Reinterpretation was the
New Humanist and scourge of the research specialists, Norman
Foerster, whose previously discussed polemic against the
research industry, The American Scholar, appeared the following
year.
     Both Foerster in his introduction and other contributors
to the Reinterpretation expressed impatience with the kind of
scholarship which still assumed that "facts of any sort are
worthy of blind pursuit," and they explicitly connected the
cause of American literature in the university with the cause
of criticism. The essays in the Reinterpretation did not oppose
criticism to literary history but emphasized the need to
integrate the two, to merge history and criticism in a larger
cultural study that would bring literary studies into more
intimate connection with American society. It was this impulse
toward synthesis and integration more than anything that gave
the new field an iconoclastic and populist aura that continued
to be part of its image for decades to come. The very sites
that became known as centers of American literature study
bespoke a break with the traditional eastern and New England
universities: Pattee's Penn State; V. L. Parrington's University
of Washington; the University of North Carolina, one of the
first to emphasize work in American literature and the home of
such first-generation Americanists as Foerster, Howard Mumford
Jones, Floyd Stovall, and C. Hugh Holman.
     American patriotism, then, was the force that initially
reawakened the old concern with nationality as an organizing
category of literary study, but as American literature studies
became professionalized the reassertion of nationality had less
to do with exclusionary piety about the national spirit than
with transcending positivistic specialization, embracing
diversity as part of the whole, and even bridging the gap
between high and popular American culture. In a passage
reminiscent of one of Whitman or Emerson's democratic catalogs,
Harry Hayden Clark predicted that the literary historian of the
future will have to widen his vision and take into proper
account such factors as the invention of the rotary press, the
state of general education and enlightenment, the constant
cheapening of the processes of printing, the increasing ease of
travel and communication, the distribution of surplus wealth
and leisure, the introduction of the typewriter, the
distribution of bookstores and circulating libraries, the
popularization of the telephone, motor car, movies, and radio,
and legislative attitudes toward such questions as censorship,
international copyright, and a tariff on foreign books.
     Emphasizing the "parallelism" of "cultural phenomena" in
their "interaction and interdependence," Clark warned that "the
student of literature is under a constant temptation to keep
his eyes so close to the particular specimen under examination
that . . . he often forgets that the plant has roots, a stem, a
system of life, and is affected by changes in temperature,
soil, and other incidental conditions." The product of such
efforts is "literature studied in a vacuum, without relation to
anything but itself." Such statements suggest how closely the
initial aspirations of American literature studies were tied to
a quest for cultural synthesis not unlike what Van Wyck Brooks
and the young radical intellectuals were calling for. But
unlike Brooks's impressionistic talk of a usable past, this
project would combine synthetic vision with precise scholarship.
     The figure who at first most influenced the shape of that
combination was V. L. Parrington, whose three-volume Main
Currents in American Thought (1927-30) reinforced the link
between the academic study of American literature and the
progressive social outlook of the nonacademic critics. Howard
Mumford Jones recalled "the tingling sense of discovery" with
which he and his generation first read Parrington, following
"this confident marshalling of masses of stubborn material into
position, until book, chapter, and section became as orderly as
a regiment on parade!" According to Lionel Trilling,
Parrington's ideas were still in the late forties "the accepted
ones wherever the college course in American literature is
given by a teacher who conceives himself to be opposed to the
genteel and the academic and in alliance with the vigorous and
the actual."
     But Parrington's influence was no sooner establised than it
began to be attacked, and it would soon become a casualty of the
reaction against progressive criticism at the end of the
thirties.  As the title of his major study suggested,
Parrington was a historian of ideas rather than of literature,
a member of the generation of Greenlaw, Nitze, and Jones, that
still thought of scholarship as a science and of criticism as
inherently subjectivist or, in Parrington's favorite term of
condescension, "belletristic." Accordingly, critics in the
thirties attacked Parrington's conception of literary "thought"
as an instance of the reductionism they found in Lovejoy's
history of ideas, compounded by Parrington's thoroughgoing
economic determinism.
     In an essay of 1940 that turned out to be decisive,
"Parrington, Mr. Smith, and Reality" (reprinted in revised form
as "Reality in America" in The Liberal Imagination), Trilling
charged that Parrington's conception of culture as a set of
"currents" betrayed his "characteristic weakness as a
historian," his inability to see that "a culture is not a flow,
nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle,
or at least debate -- it is nothing if not a dialectic."
Parrington might well have retorted that "currents" could be
dialectical -- as his history in fact might have been thought to
to show. But what was at issue for Trilling was Parrington's
allegedly uncritical conception of "reality" as "always
material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and
unpleasant." It was this crude materialism that had led
Parrington to dismiss Poe, Melville, and Henry James as
escapists, while excusing writers like Dreiser for writing
badly as long as they were properly, as Trilling put it,
"impatient of the sterile literary gentility of the
bourgeoisie."  Yvor Winters echoed Trilling's judgment, writing
in 1943 that Parrington had been "almost brutally crude" in
distinguishing the ideas in a work of art from its
"belletristic" aspect. By the end of the thirties, those
searching for a synthesis of American literature and culture
had to look for an alternative to Parrington.
         
               THEORIES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

     They tended to find the alternative in the study of
cultural motifs and symbols, which, from the end of the 1930S,
has produced an outpouring of theorizing about the "American"
element in American literature that is one of the distinctive
achievements of academic literary studies. Over the ensuing
twenty-five years, the theoretical synthesis of American
literature achieved a flowering as a critical genre. A partial
list of the major works would include Yvor Winters, Maule's
Curse (1938); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (194I);
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and
Myth (1950); Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American
Literature (I953); R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (1955);
Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957);
Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville
(1958); Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
(first edition, 1960); Marius Bewley, The Eccentric Design
(1963); A. N. Kaul, The American Vision: Actual and Ideal
Society in Nineteenth Century Fiction (1964); Leo Marx, The
Machine in the Garden (1965); and Richard Poirier, A World
Elsewhere (1966).
     It was this generation of theorists that was the first to
apply the methods of the New Criticism to American literature,
and in their hands -- more than in other fields, I believe --
the New Criticism became a historical and cultural method. This
was accomplished by reviving the latent cultural dimension of
organicist poetics that, for Coleridge and the Southern New
Critics, had connected the literary with the social organism.
The theorists of American literature conceived the organic
structure of a literary work as a microcosm of collective
psychology or myth and thus made New Criticism into a method of
cultural analysis.
     Their first step, however, was to overturn and revise the
simplistically negative interpretation of American Puritanism
that had come down from Parrington and Mencken. In the work of
Perry Miller and of Winters, the Puritans suddenly achieved a
new and complex relevance to later American writing. Miller, in
studies of Puritanism in the thirties such as The New England
Mind: the Seventeenth Century (1939), rejected Parrington's
picture of the Puritans as reactionaries out of step with the
ultimately progressive direction of American history. Miller
located in Jonathan Edwards's thought the sources of a
visionary tradition of perception that anticipated the
symbolist methods of later poets, and he charted a continuity
"from Edwards to Emerson" in the conflict between antinomian
and Arminian theological impulses.
     In Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in American Obscuratism
(1938), Winters extended certain implications of Miller's work
-- though Winters was influenced less by Miller than by the
intellectual historian H. B. Parkes. Winters argued that
Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Jones Very, and Henry Adams had
inherited a Puritan obsession with allegorical meanings even as
they no longer fully believed such meanings could be based in
experience. These writers retained the Puritan allegorical
habit of perception at the same time as they no longer accepted
the dogmatic theology that might have legitimated it, and they
were therefore thrown back on private sources of belief. This
"curse" Winters suggestively likened to the one visited by
Hawthorne's Matthew Maule on the descendants of the House of
the Seven Gables: "God will give him blood to drink."  What was
striking in Winters's argument was the suggestion that American
literature comprised a conceptual unity, that it could be read
as a kind of debate of American writers among and within
themselves. The debate was not a "Great Conversation" above or
outside history, as John Erskine had used that phrase in shaping
his Great Books concept, but a collective struggle to interpret
American historical experience. It assumed that American
literature was a series of efforts, continuing still in the
present day, to come to terms with the ambiguous and
self-destructive legacy of Puritan ancestry. In this vision,
the national literature -- or at least a major part of it --
made sense as a life-and-death debate over a common set of
issues.  Such a vision had already been suggested by Brooks and
D. H.  Lawrence, but developed only in an impressionistic way.
     It was probably because the turn Winters gave his
interpretation was so pejorative (a later book in which he
extended it was called The Anatomy of Nonsense) that he has
received less credit than others as a pioneer figure. Already
well developed in Maule's Curse are the themes that would
shortly come to define the widely expounded "romance"
interpretation of American literature: the central role of the
Puritans; the continuity from Puritan to Transcendentalist to
modernist; the cultivation of symbolic perception and of
intensity of experience divorced from society; the primacy of
Manichean dualism and unresolved moral and epistemological
conflict in the American imagination.  Into the largely moral
dualisms emphasized by Winters and Miller, later theorists
would inject a social dimension through various permutations of
the themes of escape and evasion of social experience.
     Here the predominant oppositions became "Adamic" innocence
versus tragic experience (Lewis); frontier versus city (Smith);
pastoral "middle landscape" versus industrial machine (Marx);
and male fellowship versus acceptance of social and sexual
experience (Fiedler). These thematic dualisms were seen to
correspond to a formal dualism between American romance,
symbolism, and preoccupation with a "world elsewhere" of art
(Chase, Feidelson, Poirier) over against socially grounded
European realism. The theory of the American symbolic romance
made a kind of virtue of the perennial complaint leveled at
America by nineteenth-century American writers that the
country's inherent poverty of social experience had put them at
a disadvantage. Cushing Strout has pointed out that one reason
Tocqueville became such a central authority for critics in the
forties was that he lent support to this myth of the peculiarly
impoverished state of social experience in America, as for
instance in his prophecy that in democratic nations literature
diverts "the imagination from all that is external to man and
fixes it on man alone," man as such, rather than man as
localized in a specific society. As Strout observes,
Tocqueville's vision of "a poetic subject disengaged from
society" appealed to critics who already thought of American
literature as an escape from the world and society." The idea
of the romance permitted critics to "account for the qualities
in American writing that distinguished it from English social
realism," making "something positive out of the lack of social
density in the American novel in terms of English social class."
     The symbolic-romance theory, stressing as it did the
inability of American narratives to resolve their conflicts
within any social form of life, provided expression for
disappointments left over from the thirties toward a society
that had failed to fulfill its ideal image of itself but
evidently could not be righted by social action. The "tragic
vision" of American writing bespoke a sense of innocence
betrayed, of pastoral hopes disappointed, a conviction, as Leo
Marx summarized it at the end of The Machine in the Garden,
that "the aspirations once represented by the symbol of an
ideal landscape have not, and probably cannot, be embodied in
our traditional institutions." As Irving Howe later argued, a
kind of "apolitical politics" was at stake here, "not the usual
struggle among contending classes nor the interplay and
mechanics of power, but a politics concerned with the idea of
society itself, a politics that dares consider whether society
is good and -- still more wonderful question -- whether society
is necessary." To read the American canon as a tragic romance
was to see it as a critique not just of "traditional"
institutions, as it was for Leo Marx, but of any institutions.
     The one theorist of the group whose politics were most
conspicuously not apolitical was F. O. Matthiessen, whose
American Renaissance (194I) managed to transform the organic
social conservatism of Eliot and the Agrarians into a
celebration of the democratic spirit. Matthiessen's book
comprehensively fused cultural criticism and academic literary
history with the New Criticism's method of explication and its
themes of complexity, paradox, and tragic vision. It combined a
feeling for national literary identity with scrupulously
thorough -- if sometimes needlessly prolix -- explications of
individual texts. Like the work of Miller and Winters, American
Renaissance stood above the routine studies of its time by
confronting American literature not only as an academic field
but as a problem of cultural destiny.  Matthiessen set out to
overcome the "inordinate cleavage between fact and theory" that
had troubled earlier academic and nonacademic critics and to
challenge "the usual selfish indifference of our university men
to political or social responsibility." Matthiessen said
American culture's greatest weakness "has continued to be that
our so-called educated class knows so little of the country and
the people of which it is nominally part."
     Unfortunately, the very comprehensiveness of Matthiessen's
book set a limit to the fusion he was attempting and in the
process dramatized the obstacles to making the academic setting
the basis of a revived cultural criticism. After Matthiessen,
no critical generalization would seem worth taking seriously
unless supported by pages of voluminous textual explication,
and after him the old public-spirited criticism to which
Matthiessen was trying to restore respectability looked all the
more like an unprofessional anachronism that academics could
safely ignore. And as Jonathan Arac has pointed out,
Matthiessen's work was immediately appropriated by academic
critics in ways that were contrary to his democratic socialist
intentions: "recall the irony that his work produced specialists
of a sort that he himself considered 'hopefully obsolescent.'"

              ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND LIMITATIONS

     Historical scholars were quick to protest that the
"American culture" and "American history" grandly invoked by
the theorists of American literature were frequently so
tendentiously described that they were unrecognizable. As often
as not, the history in question rested on little more than bold
assertions, buttressed by the occasional quotation from
Tocqueville, Lawrence, or Frederick Jackson Turner. What Warner
Berthoff said in a 1967 review of Poirier's A World Elsewhere
can be said about the critical genre as a whole:  "America,"
Berthoff said, figured "as an almost completely unanalyzed
historical integer." About the same time, Howard Mumford Jones
complained that "once it is granted that the only parts of a
usable past for Americans of the mid-twentieth century are
those that are precisely like the values and anxieties of the
twentieth century," it seems evident that "the cultural purpose
of historical studies weakens or vanishes." It was the old
scholarly charge of anachronism once again, and again the
charge had some validity. The dualism and paradox that New
Critics somewhat questionably attributed to poetry as such had
a suspect way of reappearing in the work of Americanists as the
supposedly unique characteristics of American literature and
culture. Work after work of American literature was said to be
uniquely American because of those qualities of tragic vision,
moral ambiguity, psychological duplicity, and other
"existential" traits that New Critics attributed to great
literature irrespective of nationality. All literature was New
Critical, it seemed, but American literature was somehow a bit
more so. The danger Ruland noted in Van Wyck Brooks's work came
to roost in the academic theorists, who seemed able to create
mythical usable pasts at will.
     Nor did it escape notice that the theorists'
generalizations about "American literature" rested on a very
limited number of works. As Berthoff suggested, nearly all the
theorizing was based on "the same limited number of authors and
titles -- the contents of a year's course in the American
classics." Jones charged that most of the theorizing "ignored
or naively misconstrued" kinds of American literature that did
not conform to its presuppositions -- for example, the
"obviously non-symbolic prose of the Revolutionary Era and of
the founding fathers." He added that "those who read American
literature in terms of unconscious imaginative process, racial
memory, symbolical expression, and hidden Angst have concocted
in many cases a language that at its best is cultist and at its
worst is jargon."
     As Berthoff put it, what the theorists of American
literature had not sufficiently considered was the possibility
that "American literature is, very simply, not an organic or
dialectical whole."  Berthoff acutely suggested that the
"inflation of limited evidence to the end of selling some
comprehensive package-conception of the order of things, the
evasiveness as to real historical causes and parallels," was a
result of the "accidental separation in most universities of
the study of American literature from the rest of the
curriculum" and the need to legitimate "a field for
professional inquiry and advancement." Berthoff pointed out
that such a need had been very remote from the minds of the
preacademic generation of Van Wyck Brooks and Constance Rourke,
whose reinterpretations of American literature had been
inspired by "new movements in art and letters, during the anni
mirabiles of high modernism, and from the related surge of
progressivist hopefulness in politics and social action."
According to Berthoff, just as the university had turned the
New Criticism into a narrowly intrinsic form of explication, it
had turned the historical study of American literature into an
equally reductive form of theorizing.
     Still more recently, the theorists of the forties and
fifties have become targets of a "new historicism" that has
offered a revisionary reinterpretation of American literary
history. The ideological implications of the official American
literature canon are exposed, the opposition between romance
and realism is deconstructed, and the "valorization" of romance
as a means of transcending politics gives way to an analysis of
romance as a site of political conflict. To take one example,
in Subversive Genealogy (1983), a study of Melville, Michael
Paul Rogin argues that "the critics most sensitive to the
symbolic power of American fiction still separate it too far
from American historical experience. They still protect
American literature from contamination by the 'petty interests'
of American society.  Rogin sets out to provide a corrective by
reading Melville's romances for their bearing on "the
distinctive American social facts of mobility, continental
expansion, and racial conflict."
     Part of the new historicist challenge to the dominant
pattern of theorizing has come from feminist critics, who argue
with Nina Baym that "if one accepts current theories of
American literature," one accepts "a literature that is
essentially male." Not only that, one also accepts a myth that
defines that literature as a set of "melodramas of beset
manhood," in which male protagonists are ever in flight from
the destructive pressures of an overcivilized, artificial
society identified with women. Baym rightly reminds us that the
same myth is used by women writers in inverted form, with the
main character as a woman and "the socializer and domesticator
. . . a man." But when this happens these writers are felt "to be
untrue to the imperatives of their gender, which require
marriage, childbearing, domesticity. Instead of being read as a
woman's version of the myth, such novels are read as stories of
the frustration of female nature. Stories of female frustration
are not perceived as commenting on, or containing, the essence
of our culture, and so we do not find them in the canon."
     Such challenges are related to those protesting the
exclusion of American popular literature from the dominant
theories. In promoting romance over realism, the postwar
theorists quietly substituted an academic tradition for a
popular (and populist) one, taking the side of "high" art over
"masscult." They overthrew the naturalistic canon of the
twenties and thirties that had itself only a short time before
displaced the genteel canon of Bliss Perry and Henry Van Dyke.
When the postwar theorists mentioned popular literature at all
it was only to contrast the "sentimental" versions of romance
and pastoralism they represented (e.g., Gone with the Wind and
Anthony Adverse) with their "complex" counterparts in the
highbrow tradition. And when they did embrace writers in the
popular tradition such as Cooper, Hawthorne, and Twain, they
did so in ways that depopularized their work, emphasizing the
elements of ambiguity, obliquity, and unresolved conflict.
Richard Brodhead makes the point well when he says that "the
academicization of American literature in the twentieth century
proceeded by delegitimating the popular portion of the previous
canon, and constructing a new canon that was thoroughly
unpopular (hence the final arrival of such writers without
audiences as Melville, Dickinson, and Thoreau)."
     In this process Emerson and Whitman underwent a
devaluation that had the curious effect of enhancing their
importance, for though these writers were criticized for their
"innocence" and lack of "tragic vision," they remained figures
to reckon with in a way that the naturalists did not. They
could be related to the symbolist viewpoint that was now said
to be centrally American, and they remained presences later
writers had to wrestle with. Dreiser, by contrast, whose work
had been concerned with a specific form of society rather than
with the "idea" of society, could be safely neglected. Though
Matthiessen published a book about him and he remained a
"field," Dreiser was in some departments demoted to such
inferior status that (I can testify from experience) graduate
students risked the scorn of certain faculty members if they
admitted even to having read his work. Fiedler and Chase made a
place for Dreiser and other naturalists in their theories, but
only by exploiting what traces of symbolic romance they could
find in them.
     Valid though they are, these criticisms should be put in
perspective. The progressivist view of American literature
against which these theorists were reacting had been barely
more adequate than the genteel view it had replaced. As Leslie
Fiedler observed in the late fifties, the symbolist-romance
interpretation of American literature provided "a long overdue
counterbalance to the never-satisfactory view of our literary
history as a slow struggle upward from darkness toward realism."
     Whatever their political failings, there is something
misplaced in the recent tendency to assimilate the postwar
theories of American literature, along with much other
criticism of the period, to a "social control" model that makes
Cold War ideology, "disciplinary power," and "surveillance" so
pervasive that it empties these concepts of useful content. In
a curious kind of academic competition in which each critic
tries to establish himself by "out-lefting" all others, the
very concept of an "American Renaissance" is reread as a mere
rationalization of the Cold War, and particular classics are
reread accordingly. To take just one example, the
interpretation of Moby Dick "in which Ishmael's freedom is
opposed to Ahab's totalitarianism" is interpreted as an apology
for American anticommunism -- a statement about " 'our' freedom
versus 'their' totalitarianism."
     Despite their undeniable lack of interest in what would
now be called the socially produced nature of American writing,
the theorists of American literature did show a readiness to
move from explication of particular works to larger statements
about American culture as a whole, and this trait distinguishes
them from many other scholars and explicators of their time. To
talk about American literature as an escape from society was at
least to revive questions of literature and society, as few
academic scholars and critics were doing. And the kinds of
questions that were raised -- Berthoff notwithstanding -- did
have meaning beyond the confines of an academic field. The
postwar theorists' fusion of history and explication may not
have added up to a convincing "usable past," but it provided a
potentially usable context for students of American literature.
Though sweeping assertions about loss of innocence and the
machine and the garden can become examination cliches just as
cheaply arrived at as any close readings of isolated works,
some cliches are more productive than others, particularly when
the alternative to a simplistic overview is usually no overview
at all.
     To see the point, one need only compare the theoretical
syntheses of American literature with the monumental Literary
History of the United States, edited by Robert E. Spiller,
Willard Thorp, Thomas H. Johnson, and Henry Seidel Canby, first
published in 1948 and reprinted in several subsequent editions.
As Spiller's prefatory "Address to the Reader" shows, the
History aimed again to revive the question of national literary
identity. Spiller harked back to Taine in his characterization
of American literature as "an organic expression of [American]
experience." But Ren Wellek was probably right to say that the
Spiller History only demonstrated "the impasse which literary
history has reached in our time." The volume made an attempt at
thematic coherence (Matthiessen and Henry Nash Smith were among
the contributors whose chapters attempted overviews), but the
fragmentary structure of the work, perhaps inevitable in any
collaborative history of this kind, belied its claim to make
organic sense of American experience. A student seeking a
context for American literature study will probably get more
from a handful of the theoretical studies than from the whole
of the History.
     To return to the original question, then, why did so
promising an attempt to revive questions of national culture
fail to exert the influence one might have expected? Why did
it, in Jonathan Culler's words, produce "an interdisciplinary
subfield rather than a reorganization of knowledge"? For
perhaps outside of a few American Studies programs at their
best moments (that is, the rare occasions when the teaching of
literature in the English department was even affected by the
American studies program), probably few of the best students in
American literature courses over the past three decades even
heard of the issues being raised by the theorists of American
literature, much less used these issues as a context for their
studies. They constituted at most a "special topic" for those
interested in presumably rarefied subjects, and that is what
they remain today, along with the new political critiques,
which, for all their excesses, are at least an attempt to keep
larger issues alive. The old debate over the national letters
has not ceased, but it goes on increasingly behind the backs of
almost everyone except those for whom it is a field.
     Why this happened has to do, again, with that dynamics of
"patterned isolation" with which we have been concerned before
in this book. This is a pattern that has welcomed innovations,
but so isolated them that their effect on the institution as a
totality is largely nullified. American literature and culture
studies were merely added to the existing departments and
fields, which did not have to adapt to them, quarrel with them,
or recognize their existence to any sustained degree. Their
influence has finally been assimilated, but quietly and in
uncontroversial fashion.
     But this fate was little different from that of other
postwar literary fields that harbored enlivening debates -- the
Renaissance, for example, where a debate between medieval
Christian and modern secular interpretations of the period
became a central issue, or the Romantic period, where
instructive controversies arose over how or whether the term
"romanticism" could be defined and whether it was continuous or
discontinuous with modernism. A similar marginality overtook
other postwar programs organized around cultural history, such
as the Committee on Social Thought at the University of
Chicago, the Modern Thought Program at Stanford, and the
History of Consciousness Program at Santa Cruz. All these
programs have generated excitement and produced unusually good
students, but "the reorganization of knowledge" implicit in
their approaches has yet to become central in the university.
     The failure of cultural history to become a centralizing
context created a vacuum that was readily filled by an
attentuated New Criticism of explication for explication's
sake. This explains why criticism had no sooner triumphed in
the university after the war than it began to be routinized.