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Chapter  Figures of Print, Orders of Time, and the Character of American Modernity There was, as usual, a crowd of folk about the door [of the village inn], but none that Rip recollected. The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility. He looked in vain for the sage Nicholas Vedder, with his broad face, double chin, and fair long pipe, uttering clouds of tobacco-smoke instead of idle speeches; or Van Bummel, the schoolmaster, doling forth the contents of an ancient newspaper . In place of these, a lean, bilious-looking fellow, with his pockets full of hand-bills, was haranguing vehemently about rights of citizens— elections—members of congress—liberty—Bunker’s Hill—heroes of seventy -six—and other words, which were a perfect Babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle. —Washington Irving, ‘‘Rip Van Winkle’’ The figure of print epitomizes a certain theory of American literature . As in Washington Irving’s ‘‘Rip Van Winkle,’’ nineteenth-century American writing often features images of invasive handbills, newspapers, and other forms of print culture assaulting the integrity of local people and their places. Delivered by strangers who resemble Irving’s ‘‘bilious-looking fellow,’’ these figures of print signify a new way of being in time and a recalibration of the scale of social life.1 In the epigraph to this chapter, for example , Irving asks his reader to date the Hudson Valley’s nationalization to the intrusion of printed matter into bucolic scenes of local life. The implication is that an emerging national culture of print will use America’s new roads, trains, and waterways to penetrate the nation’s farther reaches. Its periphery and backwoods will be provided with an experience of reading that echoes the heady currents of progress coursing through America’s urban centers. And they will be provided with this experience whether they want it or not. Figures of Print  A viral national culture of print is implicated, then, in the temporality of progress’s becoming the nation’s single common denominator. It is also credited with the newly discovered American ability to imagine the nation as what the nineteenth-century railroad magnate Mark Hopkins called ‘‘a single body, pervaded by one sympathetic nerve, and capable of being simultaneously moved by the same electric flash of thought.’’2 If the citizens of the United States are finally coming to know themselves as subjects of a national common time, then the figure of print demands print culture’s fair share of credit for this swift and far-reaching change. The figure of print’s account of modernity anticipates the great social theories that begin to emerge later in the nineteenth century. As in Tönnies, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, Irving’s modernity initially appears to involve a radical rupture with the past. This rupture’s implications are both wide and deep: a destruction of locality follows the loosening of ties to kith and kin, local folk are reembedded into broader translocal networks (i.e., nations , regions, and races), and a countervailing bourgeois antimodernism becomes the dominant mode of social critique. In classic and more recent theories of modernity, these radical changes follow from a fundamental severing of the traditional relationship between time and space. The increasing sophistication of travel technologies figures large in this narrative because it compresses space and brings geographically distant people closer together . Yet these new travel technologies are just one component of a process that permanently unhinges the measurement of time from the contingencies of space. In this critical narrative of time-space distanciation and supralocal social reaffiliation, there is no more important actor than the rise of mass communication symbolized by industrial technologies of print. In this chapter, I examine the contribution of the figure of print to an account of American modernity with roots in the nineteenth century. I also propose a reconceived role for literature in modernity’s disarticulated time and space. In the period in question, which is roughly the first half of the nineteenth century, two important theories of literature predominated in the United States. The first is the cultural nationalist model identified with editors such as the Duyckinck brothers, with Emerson, and with Whitman’s uptake of Emerson’s charge. In this first familiar model, literature expresses the feeling of the nation, systematizes its thought, and allows nascent Americans to identify with their distant countrymen. Although the second approach is related to...

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