Death to the American Renaissance: History, Heidegger, Poe

From Women: A Pictorial Archive from NineteenthCentury Sources, selected by Jim Harter (New York: Dover, 1978), II3. Death to the American Renaissance: History, Heidegger, Poe RUSS CASTRONOVO The essays gathered together here with the mission of "reexamining the American Renaissance" have their origins in spirited roundtables at the 2003 annual conventions of the American Literature Association and the Modern Language Association . For my contribution to this project, I want to alter that format slightly. What if we were to get rid of the roundtable and substitute a different sort of table, say the anatomist's table? What possibilities are opened up by taking the idea of "reexamining the American Renaissance" as an invitation to conduct an autopsy of the literary history that has given this period pride of place in our monographs, journals, hiring practices , syllabi, and classrooms? In short, what happens when we dissect periodization, examining the pathology of assumptions that correlate literary meaning around rather stable renderings of history? The investigation of these issues reveals that the condition of literary history is far more serious than at first suspected: periodization, synchronicity, and other aspects of what Martin Heidegger called "historiological" thinking are dead.1 Instead of grieving for this loss, critics and students of American literature should view the findings of this autopsy as an opportunity to amplify the significance of "American Renaissance " texts by emancipating them not only from dates but also from dated meanings. It should be made clear from the outset that pronouncing the "American Renaissance" a dead heuristic does not mean fSQ I V. 49 I 1ST-3RD QUARTERS \ 2003 179 RUSS CASTRONOVO the category no longer exists as a system that organizes the horizon of our expectations. The "American Renaissance" will always be with us, but it may no longer animate arid determine interpretation as thoroughly as it once did. The human corpse certainly exists, but the survivors relate to it differently than to a living form: the challenge of this essay, then, is to understand ourselves as survivors of the "American Renaissance" possessed of a distinct opportunity to engage authors and texts in a different manner, namely without respect to received notions of causality, periodization, or historical context. Indeed, this strategy treats literature without respect as an experiment in locating the text in "a register beyond empiricism." As Christopher Lane contends, even the seemingly innocuous act of tethering a novel to a date, as when we write "Moby-Dick (1851)" or "Hope Leslie (1827)/' is a fetishistic projection that privileges the historically mimetic qualities of these novels over their imaginative, nonreferential, and even fantastic possibilities.2 I will be among the first to confess a certain hermeneutic thrill in being able to record the date of publication parenthetically, as if to justify my investments in a particular novel by grounding any and all leaps of interpretation in the unquestionable surety of history. But while disputing publication dates makes little sense unless, of course, additional empirical evidence suggests otherwise, interrogating chronology per se and the often unreflexive turn to history it encourages as the necessary foundation and implicit limit of analysis is much more rewarding . Because situating a text in historical context is to not situate it in another context, no gesture is more political than this initial move common to so many contemporary acts of literary and cultural interpretation. In this regard, "periodization , " as Russell Berman writes, "appears to be little more than a strategy to discipline temporal experience and to restrict the imagination to the historical present."3 As critics pick up dates, chronologies, and still more sophisticated tools of historicism, such as the "hideous and intolerable allegory" that would position Moby-Dick, for instance, as counterdiscourse to the Compromise of 1850,4 they risk overlooking the liabilities that accompany these efforts. Like all tools, those of historicism can become a crutch. 180 DEATH TO THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE While this essay's disrespect toward historicism generally and periodization in particular has much in common with the critiques of Lane and Berman, its methodology can better be described as Whitmanesque. Amid the sprawling lists of Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist's table, What is...