-
Foreword
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
a renewed interest in cultural criticism attentive to discursive and ideological issues. Indeed, it is probably not too much to say that Pearce's book has played some real part in keeping the possibility of such criticism alive in America. For when Savagism first appeared (in 1953, as The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization), there was very little literary interest in broad, historical studies of ideology and discourse. By discursive studies, I mean inquiries which, recognizing that all speech and writing are social as well as individual, inquire into how meanings are socially produced in any specific historical period. Ideological studies—I take, here, Terry Eagleton's recent statement as a useful working definition—are those that consider "the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in."1 Such studies, as I have said, were hardly prominent in American criticism of the 1950s, a time when the dominant mode of study was that of the New Criticism which insisted upon an "intrinsic," essentially formalist critique of literature, one that located literary meaning not in the social practices —speech and writing among them—of everyday life, but in the "tensions," ironies, and paradoxes of language within "the poem itself "—poetry, inevitably, far more than any other kind of text, most 1 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, 1983), p. 14. vii I HE REISSUE of Roy Harvey Pearce's Savagism and Civilization comes at an especially propitious moment, one in which there is T Foreword ARNOLD KRUPAT obviously seeming to enjoy a relatively autonomous existence. Literary study for the New Critics had very little to gain from "extrinsic" attention to history. But it was not only Pearce's broad concern for the ideological contours of discourse in history which made his book very different from most other studies of American literature; indeed, his particular choice of subject matter must also have seemed rather strange as well. For, although the years between the two World Wars had seen a flurry of interest in the Indian—anthologies of Native poetry appearing for the first time and Indian subjects attracting the attention of such diverse luminaries as Mary Austin, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and Yvor Winters, among others—nonetheless, I can think only of Albert Keiser's 1933 study, The Indian in American Literature, as even vaguely approximating Pearce's concern with EuropeanAmerican thought about the Native American. The only study roughly parallel in method to Pearce's work, Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950), took no notice whatever of Indians, although it was just recently , in a posthumously published piece, that Smith himself acknowledged that his study "would be a much better book if it showed even a partial awareness of the materials that would be brought together in subsequent years by Roy Harvey Pearce."2 Pearce's study emerged from his graduate work at Johns Hopkins and his training in the method of intellectual history associated with Arthur O. Lovejoy, professor of philosophy at Hopkins, and generally referred to as "the history of ideas." It was Lovejoy's belief that ideas, or idea complexes as he called them, could be separated out of texts and discourses and studied logically and analyticallyin historical context . This procedure, "the thinking through of the logical possibilities 2 Henry Nash Smith, "Symbol and Idea in Virgin Land," in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, eds., Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge, 1986), p. 28. In fact, Pearce's "The Significances of the Captivity Narrative," had already appeared, in 1947, before the publication of Smith's book. In that essay, Pearce showed, among other things, how one of the two earliest indigenously developed genres of writing in America—the other was the Indian War narrative—had taken the idea of the Indian as central to American thought. Vlll FOREWORD [3.91.176.3] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:13 GMT) latent in any statement of belief or in any idea,"3 as Pearce would later describe it, led to "understanding." Lovejoy's own work, for the most part, was content to remain at this analytic level. Pearce, however , wished to go on to the level of synthesis, in which "Combinations of unit ideas . . . were placed in their socio-cultural contexts and were shown as they shaped men's minds and opinions leading them to acts."4 This was, as Pearce understood it...