Note: Scanned and partially corrected.


Jay Gurlan

"American Studies and the Creative Present,"

     Midcontinent American Studies Journal, spring 1969, volume x, number 1.

     Recently, a senior was telling me about his experiences at three universities. Aside
from majoring in English and minoring in Art, he writes poetry, shapes ceramics, makes
picture frames, is a folk singer and has worked in a national art gallery. At twenty-one he
is also one of the most perceptive, articulate students I have ever had in an American
Studies course. He has spent six months--not just a free summer--working for SNIC in
back-country Mississippi. He is serious-minded, engaged, committed. Very troubled, he
said, "Looking back, I realize that my first few months in college I kept running from
building to building looklng for the education I'd never find."
The picture was agonizing to this university teacher because it was honest, emotional,
accurate--and accusing. He is the future writer an(i artist in contemporary society, and I
would like to talk about what American Studies could mean to him.
Because the work in my courses interested him, I encouraged this student to consider an
B.A. in American Studies. Like so many of our brilliant, troubled or alienated students, he
prefers the idea of getting at the past and its traditions from many directions at once.
American Studies appeals to his natural preferences. But I knew that he was still trotting
the campus in search of ideas, issues, concrete materials an(l creative means to express his
concerns about the present. Here I had reservations. Despite my own dedication to the
American Studies idea, I had to warn him that something would be lacking in the field: his
own place, his own time (and the active creative means for expressing himself. These are
particularly important to his kind, for| the future artist is much more socially and politically
minded than he might have been in courtly Europe or expansive turn-of-the-century
America. The young artist between the World Wars may have looked for the
contemporary in Europe, but the young artist now looks for it in foreign policies, ghettos,
freedom schools, pot, disaffiliation--in America itself.
Our field does not offer enough to a young man like this. Though not everywhere,
American Studies has become too much a comfortable, somewhat interdisciplinary resum‚
of the American past. Though not by everyone, the contemporary aspects of American
Studies are being shortchanged. And generally, the field is not providing encouragement
or credits for the future artist, ways to use his gifts of hand, word, clay, melody or camera.
The result is that we are losing--or not even attracting--a great many seeking, adventurous
students. Some join up for a year or two, then go back to specialized fields. Others throw
the campus over altogether for an action program, a settlement house or a pad. I recall
that when I first inquired into American Studies ten years ago, it promised a broader and
more daring experience than it does today. It seems to me that the first national
conference is the right place to think about the American Studies attitude toward the
contemporary, and toward the arts and artists who will feel it most and record it best.
I began my own inquiry with American Quarterly, informally analyzing its three major
sections: articles, book reviews and calendars of events. In the issues for 196~ and the first
half of 1966 I found that the articles had to do only with matters that mattered in the
nineteenth century. Only three of the eighteen major articles even ranged from the past
into ~the present. One discussed conservative ideas of church and state from Orestes
Brownson to T. S. Eliot. Another analyzed "pietism" in American character. The last, a
prizewinning essay, showed how American myth has affected the writing of autobiography
from Cotton Mather to William Burroughs. But none of the eighteen, including these
three, had to do with present social or political situations, controversies or programs. The
church-state relationship, pietism and literary uses of myth are interesting and important.
But they are traditional and academic concerns.
I am not trying to denigrate academic concerns or tradition. American Studies is in the
academic tradition. But the academies also have to be concerned about the volatile,
difficult present, and one of the promises of American Studies is that it will take on the
American present. The stated aim of American Quarterly is "to aid in giving a sense of
direction to studies in the culture of the United States, past and present."
ù The book reviews in American Quarterly for the same period have the same limitations as
the articles. I found only two reviews of books which dealt with the contemporary scene--
one on jazz, the other on painting. Judging from the books chosen for review, I found that
1930 is considered a kind of terminal date, as if studies in American culture are not studies
when they have to do with our times. Take the race situation, for example. In the Winter,
1965 issue three books were given a package review: The Negroes Civil War, Jinl
C10ZV'S Defense and Negro Mecca. The subtitle of Negro Mecca is "A History of the
Negro in New York City, 186~-1920." In these six issues only one other review of a book
on this tremendous subject can be found. During this time there was a flood of books
dealing with present-day aspects of the situation:~ D(l~k G~letto, Freedom Sum~l?er,
Th1e~7 Lives fo~- Mississippi, Mississipp~ f~om lVit~lin, Lette1s from Mississippi,
SNCC: Tlle New Abolitionists~ Who Speaks for the Negro? to name only a few.

     What about the other most urgent and divisive issue in contemporary America?
Along with race, foreign policy interests--and should interest --the potential American
Studies student more than any other problem It does not matter whether he is a future
artist, high school teacher, journalist, federal government employee, diplomat or college
professor. None~ of the books reviewed in American Quarterly  during this year and a
half~ had anything to do with contemporary foreign policy. The subscribers to and readers
of American Quarterly are the teachers of these students. Are they not concerned with the
very subjects which most occupy their~ students? True, there is plenty of commentary
about Vietnam, the credibility gap, neo-imperialism and the Sino-Soviet split in The New
Republic, Ramparts, The  National Review, The New York Times Magazine and other
journals, left and right. But American Studies, concerned with past and present, ought to
be arguing more with itself about how the American past led to the American present. We
might have something worthwhile to say about the present questioning, on all national
levels, of the moral and material imperatives of war. The published version of Henry
Steele Commager's testimony before the Fulbright Committee is one example of what
sense American Studies can make about our own times. But it was not published in
American Quarterly.

     An artist-student, perhaps one of Mr. Commager's, paints a wild um-

ber-red-orange-black depiction of napalm enfolding a hut in the Mekong Delta. Some of
us want to shake him by the shoulders, perhaps quote him a bit of John Foster Dulles:
"Under the conditions in which we live, it is not easy to strike a perfect balance between
military and non-military efforts . . . [but] there is an imperative need for balance." ("Policy
for Security and Peace," Foreign Affairs, April, 1954.) Others might want to buy the
painting for their office walls. Some would say he's got the truth, he's cut through the
objective hypocrisy of cultural indexes and historical generalizations. Look at President
Polk planting insurgents in Texas, and look at the perverted tradition of the Alamo! This
young man with an old beard, turning his back on "reason," is going to show up Monday
morning in our classes. Whether we care to "set him straight" or to encourage his
indignation, we have to u~ant to work with him if we are going to do our jobs. If any
group of thinkers and critics is equipped to interpret current American ideas and actions in
the light of American traditions--to make sense of both--it is us.

     Other important areas of concern, dissent and social trauma are missing from the
articles, book reviews and the calendar of American Studies Regional Association events.
I realize it is dangerous to interpret content from titles, but judging from the subjects
named for American Studies conferences during 1965 and the first half of 1966, I found
that only two sets of meetings had much to do with the very recent past or the present.
One, by the New York Metropolitan Chapter in April, 1965, dealt with poverty. The
other, a series sponsored by the Michigan Chapter in March and May of the same year had
to do with race. Among the Michigan speakers were Louis Lomax, Burton Gordin
(Michigan Civil Rights Commissioner), John Killens and G.Mennen Williams. Like the
books reviewed and the articles printed, American Studies conferences are pretty much
limited by sound scholarship to safe, somewhat distant subjects.
Please do not interpret these remarks only as a criticism of the editors of American
Quarterly or the directors of conferences. They are delivering the product the field
apparently wants. My questions are about what the field wants.
It seems to me that ... Studies is demonstrating that ideas have consequences which can
best be understood through their interconnections. If we have a "method," it is the
approach to ideas and consequences in the round--a total approach something like the
"total theatre" of Bertolt Brecht. From the communication point of view, American
Studies wants more than most disciplines to include its audiences. As in total theater, it
assumes that the audience and actors are the same; the stage does not end where the lights
begin. This understandably appeals to the present student. We should be delighted that it
attracts my twenty-one year old senior. He stops running from building to building long
enough to attend his American Studies courses. He senses what we should know: that the
ideas and consequences surrounding students, teachers and artists 50 or 150 years ago
surround us and him now. They are in the classrooms, the halls, the off-center
coffeehouses, the pads, the streets, the backroads, the ghettos--even in the student unions.
The murder of three civil rights workers in 1964 is therefore as important a part of
American Studies as the lynching of tenant farmers in 1904 or the extradition of runaway
laves in 1854. Our involvement in Vietnam, Thailand, NATO, the Peace Corps, VISTA
and Fulbright Programs and the rebuilding of Western Germany and Japan are as much
influenced by pietism as was our settlement of upstate New York more than a hundred
years ago. Anti-intellectualism has as much to do with the treatment of radical artists
today as it did with the life of Edgar Allan Poe or the run of the Armory Show.

     The American Studies tendency to downplay, even to ignore contemporary ideas
and art expression shows US to be victims of the very American paradox we are so fond
of analyzing. ~'e would all agree that America has a habit of absorbing its own
unacceptable radicalisms. As 11 Jacobs has pointed out, a major automobile company sells
cars by asking its customers to join its "rebellion," while the executives of that company
criticize rebelling youth. Economically and socially, we continue to deplore socialism
while becoming a welfare state. Looking at literary art for a moment, we devoutly teacher
Sister Carrie, dismissing Dreiser's artistic ineptness and making much of his social
radicalism. But how do we handle the Dreisers of today? Like our friends in English
Departments, we dismiss or ignore--or what is worse--reject the Beat writers, William
Burroughs, Terry Southern, Norman Mailer as either salacious, naive or artistically
substandard. We push them aside for the same reasons that we push Dreiser, Hamlin
Garland or Frank Norris to the front. We have to get past the paradox of rejecting today
what we revere tomorrow. We haven't time to wait for critical distance; nor have the
future artist and teacher. It is the job of maverick and radical talent in thought, art and
craft to make life uncomfortable for us, and American Studies must give them a place to
work their unsettling magic. In other words, the field can't afford to be aloof. And
ironically, even while it remains too little a part of the academic structure, American
Studies has already become too much a part of the intellectual establishment.

     But in 1964, at the Modern Language Association conference in New York,
American Studies proved itself dramatically. In one session out of three complicated days
of forums, speeches and panels, the ASA offered John Cheever, Ralph Ellison and
Norman Mailer. The large room was overcrowded, the rear and side aisles filled with
standees. It was far and away the most popular meeting of the entire conference because it
was the only meeting in which living artists of the modern language were heard from.
Cheever and Mailer spoke less formally than Ellison--more insultingly--and they were the
better received for it. I recall an especially electric moment when Mailer leaned forward
and fixed the swollen audience with a remark about academicians with cavities where their
brains ought to be. The roomful of academicians laughed and applauded. Why? Because
most of us believed he was right. Our bellies were full, our agenda was staggering, our
general disinterest was immense. Till this meeting there had been little or nothing in the
job-hunting, handshaking circus to attract our enthusiasm. The session subjects had been
detached, polite, overly familiar, uncreative. Suddenly, we had three artists who were busy
creating the future tradition.

     That session suggests something more about the meaning of American Studies for
the creative present. One of our beliefs is that we have developed a dynamic, extraordinary
culture over the past three hundred years. An equally important belief is that we are still
developing it. Therefore, American Studies programs should directly encourage the young
talent to contribute actively to the developing culture. From our own studies we know that
contributions to tradition often come from unexpected individual talent in unexpected
places. Why not from an American Studies curriculum? Why not offer students credit for
active, creative, contemporary work. It is not enough to take "Art and Architecture in
American Life" for nine quarter credits, passively appraising slides of Horatio Greenough's
sculpture, Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie homes or A. P. Ryder's haunted seascapes. It is not
enough to take three credits in Modern American Poetry or Modern American Fiction. It
is not enough to study the development of jazz or the genius of Charles Ives. If he has the
talent, why not let the American Studies student get credits by using his hands, plaster and
pallet, by writing jazz-beat cantos, I)y composing a Whiskey-Gap Sonata or a Blue Earth
Barcarolle? There are practical ways of doing this without scandalizing curriculum
committees. Other departments' workshop courses could be allowed for American Studies
degree credit. Qualified members of those departments could be asked to help judge the
product, or to guide the work. M.A. and Ph.D. students could be given the option of
painting a mural, or composing a symphony on American themes, rather than putting
together elaborate and wordy theses on those themes. Of course they would have to do
research and place their creative objects in an interdisciplinary perspective. Is this an easy
way out of learning how to write footnotes and organize critical arguments? I doubt it.
Assuming the thesis or project advisor made the student shape his art out of American
Studies substance, it would not only take a lot of sweat and thought, it would give him a
more active sense of American traditions because it would call on his particular talents. I
am not suggesting that all students be handed this kind of option. I am only suggesting
that the minority who have these talents find out that American Studies is one of the rare
places where they will be encouraged to develop them.

     The necessary innovative spirit is already abroad in the land. In contrast to
American Quarterly, , the Midcontinent American Studies Journal healthily balances the
past and the present. In its famous Fall, 1965, issue, "The Indian Today," studies ranged
from the subjective ("Tight Shoe Night") to the objective ("The Isolated Eastern
Cherokee"); from past history to present political action ("Nationalistic Trends among
American Indians"); from traditional customs to contemporary attitudes ("Therapeutic
Experience of Responsible Democracy"). In his introductory essay, editor Stuart Levine
set the tone and approach:

     The material in this collection of articles is important. There are great practical
problems, moral issues, even questions of national identity at stake. There are things we
can learn from our "Indian problem" which we need to know in areas as diverse as cultural
history and foreign policy . . . which might help us to deal with Indians more successfully
in the future than we have in the past. Generally, the journal qualifies academically--it
transmits knowledge-- without shirking the often forgotten human obligation of engaging
in man's affairs... Its contemporaneity brings its academic content more to life. The same
can be said of The Journal s tountalnhea~l, the Amerlcan
Stuclies Program at the University of Kansas. Chaired by Stuart Levine, the program was
a host at the successful first national conference of the~ American Studies Association in
October, l 96~. The Kansas program offers all three degrees. As Levine says, it "centers in
the culture concept." Graduate students attend department meetings with voting-:~ rights.
Such non-verbal products as pottery and films are accepted as parts of doctoral
dissertations. Undergraduates write one of their own courses. I he "basic philosophy" of
the program is built on the idea of flexibility. We ask each student to name the kind of
"man" he wants to be: an arts man, an urbanist, a specialist in the period, a colonialist, an
historic sites archeologist, or whatever. He then writes his own program out of the
strengths and resources of the University. If his program coheres, and includes courses
which enable him to reach the level of significant research in the behavioral sciences,
American history, and the humanities, it is approved.

     The Program accepts "any two languages or research skills which will be of use to
him in his research," Ponca and FORTRAN for example. In many other ways, the Kansas
program points toward a more creative future for the field. Let me illustrate further. T he
American Studies Department in Hawaii is trying out a four part project to help students
use their talents. We  are working within our regular budget and we have not had to
consult any administration authorities. Our chief resource has been the enthusiasm of
students. First, in certain American Studies courses the instructors are offering the option
of substituting performance term projects for traditional term papers. Students have
sometimes chosen to team up. Last summer two students did a well-researched
multi-media dramatization of the protest at President Johnson's June 23, 1967, Century
City Plaza speech in Los Angeles. They wrote the script themselves, used tape recorder,
phonograph, placards and guitar. About twenty-five students this past year have taken this
kind of option, with very exciting and informative results.

     Second, the Department has hired a part-time student helper who works with
students and instructors. He is an able writer with experience in the visual arts. One of his
main jobs is to edit a magazine being sponsored by the American Studies Department. The
magazine, the third part of the project, is publishing some of the student performance proj-

ects, soliciting material from the entire student body and not excluding contributions from
the outside. It is a visible and permanent record of American Studies  student performance
but also an American Studies stimulus for the general campus. 

     The fourth part of the project is a series of labor historytory theatrical  per-

formances, original or published scripts chosen for their relevance to ,American problems
in current courses. One possibility is a documentary drama on the American Indian, similar
to Martin Duberman's In White America, and related to poverty, the Spring semester
subject of a large American Studies course. These plays will be cast as much as possible
with  students taking American Studies courses.  Another possibility is a set of "Routines"
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, related to alienation and absurdity-- two themes in my own
Spring semester course, "Contemporary Social Ideas in Radical Literature." These
productions will not require special budgets. we have a few large campus auditoriums with
simple stages, curtains and lighting. They may be dramatic readings, multi-media
performances or fully acted productions. To keep costs down, and the sense of experiment
high, costuming may consist of street clothes, bathing suits or as in one of Ferlinghetti's
"Routines," only enormous gauze bandages.

     The four parts of the project are interrelated and self-generating. Our student
helper has gathered four or five other student volunteers who in addition to submitting
material, work on typing, production and layout. They have been stimulated by the sense
of having a real, active "thing" to do. They in turn have been contacting their friends. I
know, because my office is unofficial editorial and production headquarters. As a result of
such activities, a number of bright, imaginative and idealistic students have begun pushing
the department to expand its present M..A. down to a B.A. and up to a Ph.D.

     In its turn, the department is making allowance for such promising studies  by
writing into its B.A. and Ph.D. proposals the possibility of tailoring a student's
requirements toward the arts and the contemporary. We do not plan to eliminate
traditional studies at all, but rather to broaden the student's elective choices, and to offer
the performance alternative selectively within our own courses. From the evidence of the
past year, I believe that we have been able to give to American Studies a vitality which has
attracted talented, adventurous students who would otherwise have been much less
excited about learning at a large institution.

     Generally, what I am suggesting is that American Studies think more about the
creative individuality of its students, understanding that at this time creative individuality is
especially involved with the world around  it. I do not believe for a minute that the model
senior I began with has any right to shape his ceramics or his poems, or to work in
Mississippi for voter registration, in ignorance of the past. He has to be a student and an
artist and a citizen all together. But the amazing and exciting thing is that my model
senior, and thousands like him, have the gumption, the vision and the means to be all three
at once. And having all this, they are likely candidates for American Studies because our
field has, built into it, a great possibility for reaching across the generations~ to make
learning, teaching and creativity live together. We begin where most disciplines end--we
open up further as they close around their discoveries. But we must do more to keep the
end open, to let the uncomfortable, the noisy, the uncatalogued, the unsanctified, the
immediate, into our enterprise.

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII