Incorporation and the Myths of American Culture

Since I have a lot to say in a very short space, I will begin with a summary of the five related but not mutually dependent points I will make: (1) that we humanists do not often enough directly consider the arguments of our predecessors and peers, preferring to offer "new" interpretations that often fail to take account of existing ones; (2) that in recent years—one might say, at a minimum, the 20 years since The Incorporation of America was published—Americanists lamentably have gotten away from offering the kind of broad cultural arguments of which Alan Trachtenberg's book is an example; (3) that American literature and culture cannot be conceived apart from some narrative of their own history; (4) that Incorporation marks a shift in American studies in which the most important narrative changes from one that turns on the events ofthe 1850s, to one that turns on the events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; (5) but that Incorporation is only a partially successful conception of that moment because the book continues to conceive of it in terms derived from the old narrative.

In researching this essay, I discovered that, although Incorporation is much cited, it has seldom been analyzed or critiqued since the reviews appeared. The reviews did some of this work, but the form limits the depth of analysis. ¹ Moreover, since it is the reviewer's job to enter a judgment, they are almost by definition overly hasty in their endorsement or dismissal. Books like Incorporation that offer serious and far-reaching arguments deserve to be thoroughly discussed with the object not of voting up or down but of deciding what elements of the argument to accept and what to reject, and how what is accepted might fit into an even larger conception of the culture.

Of course, the desirability of forming such large conceptions has not been obvious of late. Clearly one of the ways in which women and minorities were excluded was the construction of a tradition into which they did not fit. As the diversity of American culture has increasingly been recognized, the older project of characterizing the culture as a whole has largely been abandoned. ² While I do not favor a return to tradition building, a concept ofthe whole remains necessary to the project of understanding theparts. Today, that concept is usually an a priori derived from Marxism, feminism, or some other theory of society in general. Such theories are necessary, but they are not sufficient. The work of literary and cultural studies is to analyze particular historical instances of culture that will never perfectly fit any theory.

I have argued recently that American literature has been conceived as having a shape something like the Ptolemaic conception of the universe, with Emerson at the center and other luminaries placed more or less far from him. I argued that any such spatial conception of American literature is artificial and not historically justifiable (see Shumway). But if American literature does not need a shape, it must have a time. It cannot be understood without a conception of cultural and social history. Such a history was at least implicit in the once, and perhaps still, dominant conception in which the American Renaissance was understood to be the defining moment for the culture. That history was told in a variety of ways, most of which did not explicitly invoke the social. This omission was not an accident, but rather the result of the focus of the basic narrative, the story of the emergence of the individual, an Adam, an imperial self, who distinguished America from Europe where society was understood to define the person. ³ We need a new narrative—or group of narratives—of American cultural history that takes into account the last 150 years.

The Incorporation of America is arguably the starting point for such a new narrative, for a systematic rereading of American culture that focuses on...